Edward Estlin Cummings, also known as "ee cummings", was born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a well-known Congressional minister and a professor who taught sociology at Harvard University. From an early age his parents encouraged Cummings to pursue poetry, especially his mother. He dedicated himself to writing poetry and painting, considering himself an artist and a poet. After Cummings graduated from Cambridge Latin High School in 1911, he went on to major in Greek at Harvard University, eventually earning his master's degree in 1916. During his time at Harvard Cummings also studied art and worked at the Harvard Monthly, a magazine literary. 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 letters he had written. He was released in December 1917 and returned to the United States residing in the Greenwich Village section of New York City where he lived much of his final years of life. Throughout the 1920s he contributed to The Dial, perhaps America's greatest literary journal. E.E. Cummings received numerous awards during his lifetime, 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 then died in New Hampshire in September 1962. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Ultimately, everyone lives the same life, leading most people to not care what others think. In E.E. Cumming's poem “everyone lived in a beautiful city” the poem paints a picture showing people in their daily lives in which they would seem to be 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. You will notice this through Cummings' use of diction and imagery in the poem. Diction is the choice of words that a poet uses in his writings to express himself. In the poem “Someone Lived in a Fair City” E.E. Cummings uses diction to convey the message to the reader. According to critic Lewis Turco states that although the poem begins with a rhyming couplet, the next two lines do not follow. He goes on to give examples of which words rhyme and which don't; The third verse does the same thing, but the fourth takes up the pattern of the first, although if you look closely, you will see that the last lines end with the word "her", which rhymes lightly with verse 3, "winter ". Examination of the poem will reveal many other sonic effects, including assonance (“like a city”); alliteration (“spring”, “summer”, “sung”); consonantal echo (the m sound of stanza 2); cross rhyme (“stir” and “her”); and internal consonance (“bird” and “stir”). The choice of the right word for "anyone who lived in a beautiful city" was unique, the beginning of the poem contrasts "anyone" and "nobody" with "someone and everyone". According to critic Marjorie Smelstor states that in the poem the hero falls in love with "no one" and then their celebration of life rivals that of her lover, as they live life and the rest of the town experiences death, the cycle of continuous nature. In the poem EE Cummings uses imagery to illustrate the theme of the poem. The poem which is a love story with “nobody” who is a woman and “whoever is a man who lives his life yes.