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For the film, see Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town (film).

"anyone lived in a pretty how town" is a poem written by E. E. Cummings. First published in 1940, the poem details the lives of residents in a nameless town.[1] Like much of Cummings's work, the poem is actually untitled, so critics use the first line to refer to the poem. Cummings often wrote in a manner that did not follow standard English syntax and punctuation. This style is evident in the poem's first line, which is written in all lowercase letters and contains the unlikely phrase "pretty how town".

The poem inspired a short film of the same name by George Lucas.

Style

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The poem is organized into quatrains, with four beats (though a varying number of syllables) per line.[2]

The poem's opening line uses the word how in a place that would typically be filled by an adjective.[3][4] The next line ("with up so many floating bells down") is an example of hypallage, the interachange of the syntactic relationship between terms.[5]

In the poem, Cummings states the lines, "spring summer autumn winter", (3) and "sun moon stars rain", (8) multiple times. In reiterating these lines he changes the order of the seasons, "autumn winter spring summer", (11) and "stars rain sun moon", (21).

References

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  1. ^ "anyone lived in a pretty how town at NYU's Literature, Arts and Medicine Database". New York University. Archived from the original on September 7, 2006. Retrieved September 20, 2006.
  2. ^ Adams, Stephen (1997-04-07). Poetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms, and Figures of Speech. Broadview Press. p. 43. ISBN 978-1-55111-129-2.
  3. ^ Adamson, H. D. (2019-04-04). Linguistics and English Literature: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. p. 119. ISBN 978-1-107-04540-8.
  4. ^ Haralson, Eric L. (2014-01-21). Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. Routledge. p. 164. ISBN 978-1-317-76322-2.
  5. ^ Turco, Lewis (September 2020). The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship, Second Edition. University of New Mexico Press. p. 201. ISBN 978-0-8263-6192-9.
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