anyone lived in a pretty how town Lesson Plan

Why do you think Cummings gave the characters in the poem the names that he did? What impact does it have on you as a reader?

Allow for some classroom debate on this. It's likely that some students will say the names are confusing, that it's hard to follow whether it's a character named "anyone" or "noone" or the concepts those words generally represent; other students might counter that indeed, this is why Cummings used those names, to generate that sense of confusion and the possibility of universality. The poem is about the common human experience of being unusual—thus the characters "anyone" and "noone" could be anyone or no one.

How is Cummings' use of language...