Edward Estlin Cummings, also known as "ee cummings", was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a noted Congress minister and a professor who taught sociology at Harvard University. From a young age, his parents encouraged Cummings to pursue poetry, especially his mother. He devotes himself to writing poetry and painting, considering himself an artist and a poet. After Cummings graduated from Cambridge Latin High School in 1911, he majored in Greek at Harvard University and eventually earned his master's degree in 1916. While at Harvard, Cummings also studied art and worked for the Harvard Monthly, a literary magazine. In 1917, Cummings volunteered for the American Red Cross unit and was sent to France. During this time, Cummings was arrested by French authorities on suspicion of treason due to the letters he had written. He was discharged in December 1917 and returned to the United States, residing in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York where he lived most of his final years of life. Throughout the 1920s, he contributed to The Dial, perhaps America's greatest literary journal. EE Cummings received numerous awards during his life, most of them towards the end of his career: The Dial Award (1925), Academy of American Poets Fellow (1950), Guggenheim Fellow (1951), Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard (1952-53) and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1958). He later died in New Hampshire in September 1962. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay Ultimately, everyone lives the same life, which leads most people to not care what others think. In EE Cumming's poem "Anyone Lived in a Pretty Town", the poem paints a picture showing people in their daily lives where they seem involved but find the daily lives of others repetitive and monotonous. The theme of the poem is that although everyone is involved with everyone else, most people don't really know or, in fact, care what their neighbors are really like. This will be noticed through Cummings' use of diction and imagery in the poem. Diction is the choice of words that a poet uses in his writing to express himself. In the poem “Anyone Lived in a Pretty Town”, EE Cummings uses diction to get the message across to the reader. According to critic Lewis Turco, he states that although the poem begins with a rhyming couplet, the next two lines do not follow, he then gives examples of which words rhyme and which do not; The third stanza does the same thing, but the fourth returns to the pattern of the first - although if you look closely you will see that the last lines end with the word "she", which rhymes slightly with the stanza in the third line. "winter". An examination of the poem will reveal many other effects sonically, including assonance (“how the city”); alliteration (“spring”, “summer”, “sung”); consonant echo (the sound m of stanza 2); cross rhyme (“stir” and “she”); and internal consonance (“bird” and “wiggle”). Cumming's choice of the word for "anyone lived in a pretty town" was unique, the beginning of the poem contrasts "anyone" and "nobody" with "someone and everyone." According to critic Marjorie Smelstor, she states that in the poem the hero falls in love with "nobody" and his celebration of life rivals that of his lover, as they live life and the rest of the town lives death, the cycle of nature continues..