Both “anyone lived in a little how town” and “I'm Nobody! Who are you?” are complex poems. Each of these poems have very different messages; the former relating to the poet as an individual and the latter being about the passing of time. They utilize wordplay and ambiguity as rhetorical techniques through which to convey their overall message. Each of these poems utilize similar structural and rhetorical techniques – creating characters out of pronouns - to convey their messages.
Theme is an important component of any poem. It could be argued that the theme of a poem is what is most essential to poetry – the idea and message that a poem conveys is what poetry is often recognized for. Both authors, Cummings and Dickinson, have very different themes within these poems. “anyone lived in a little how town” appears to be a poem about the passing of time and various stages of life. “I'm Nobody! Who are you?”, however, conveys a theme of indignation about the outside world from the speaker.
In “anyone lived in a little how town”, the passing of time is strongly conveyed throughout the poem. The repetition of lines such as “spring summer autumn winter,” and similar prose give off the undeniable imagery of passing time1. The cycling of seasons, weather and moon and sun are all understood to be ideas behind the passing of time because these are ways through which humanity measures time. Seasons divide our year, each of these seasons has a weather pattern associated with it. The moon and sun too suggest the passing of day by day. These images, cyclical in their nature, repeat throughout the poem. The repetition of these images displays the theme of time.
The other message in Cummings' poem is related to the passage of...
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...very different meanings. Cummings' uses his poem to explore time and the stages of life, while Dickinson's poem addresses her disdain toward her contemporary poets. The similarity between the two texts is due to the rhetorical ambiguity. Both poems take the abstract idea of pronouns and develop them into characters which add to the reader's understanding of each author's theme.
Works Cited
Baker, David. ""I'm Nobody": Lyric Poetry and the Problem of People." The Virginia Quarterly Review 83.1 (2007): 197-205.
Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2005. 896 and 722.
Lord, John B. "Para-Grammatical Structure in a Poem of E. E. Cummings." Pacific Coast Philology 1 (1966): 66-73.
Monteiro, George. "Dickinson's 'I'm Nobody! Who Are You?'" Explicator 48.4 (1990): 261-62.
They both used a lot of imagery and used figurative language to give the clearest detailed descriptions about their writing. For example, Dickinson gives imagery with this phrase, “We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain.” Whitman uses phrases like this one to show imagery, “I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun.” Both poets wrote about death and both had an accepting, calm tone toward death. They both saw death as a natural occurrence. Both poets poems were at a good length, they weren’t really long nor short. They almost had the same amount of length in their poems. Figurative language played a big role in both poems. Dickinson using personification most importantly, and Whitman using metaphors mostly.
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson has a speaker that is not clearly known. It may have been the poet or a persona she created. This narrator of the poem is happy that she is a nobody and does not like people that push to be somebody. She sees these people as being self-centered and superficial (cite book pg. 361). Dickinson makes great use of the hyphen to add dramatic pause between ideas within her poem. I liked reading this one aloud more than the others because of the pause. It gave the poem more depth of meaning, almost like a conversation style between the poet and another person. There is repetition of the word “How” and assonance with the words “you”, “too”, “Frog”, and “Bog”(cite poem p. 361).
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.
Meinke, Peter. “Untitled” Poetry: An Introduction. Ed. Michael Meyer. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s 2010. 89. Print
Kenyon’s choice of a first person perspective serves as one of two main techniques she uses in developing the reader’s ability to relate to the poem’s emotional implications and thus further her argument regarding the futility of mankind’s search for closure through the mourning process. By choosing to write the poem in the first person, Kenyon encourages the reader to interpret the poem as a story told by the same person who fell victim to the tragedy it details, rather than as a mere account of events observed by a third party. This insertion of the character into the story allows the reader to carefully interpret the messages expressed through her use of diction in describing the events during and after the burial.
Poetry Criticism. Ed. V. Young, Robyn. A. & J. New York: The New York Times. Gale Research Company, 1991. Vol.
Cummings incorporated his frequently used technique of disarrayed syntax and attentiveness to sporadic typography and punctuation, according to Harmon, in his poem, “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” in order to delineate the message prominent in the poem’s text, to prevent the reader from simply
The metafictional devices in Larry Levis’ “The Poem You Asked For” are found in overt and subtle ways throughout the poem. The first metafictional device is the poem is about a character writing a poem. The narrator references the odious poem in every single stanza. Despite the narrator’s best efforts, the poem r...
Though these similarities do exist, there are also several quite obvious differences between the two. The most noticeable distinguishment involves the length of the poems. While Whitman's "Song of Myself" is quite lengthy, giving detailed and wordy descriptions, Dickinson's "This quiet dust was Gentlemen and Ladies" is much more concise and to the point. While Whitman tends to
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
Baym, Nina et al. Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 8th ed. New York:
So by comparing both of their works, their structure is different. Another key difference with both works is their use of rhyme in the works. In Whitman’s style of poetry it has not rhyme, while on the other hand Dickinson exercises the idea of slant rhyme. Slant rhyme is the use of approximate or near rhymes. In both of their works, the evidence can be seen through the structure they express themselves in...
“Major Characteristics of Dickinson’s Poetry.” Emily Dickinson Museum. Trustees of Amherst College, 2009. Web. 23 January 2014.
Mar. 1972: 86-100. pp. 86-100. Major, Clarence. American Poetry Review.