studio's in Patchen place, a remarkably English little hideaway on the edge of Greenwich Village. Like so many other corners of the village it might be almost anywhere in Chelsea - discreet, sedate and withdrawn...the quiet of Patchen Place is almost cloistral..." He also draws attention to the "eminent speakability" of Cummings' poems and the precise, rather "un-American" diction in which he delivers them. The poems themselves are fine examples of the satiric and romantic aspects of his work. 'Anyone lived in a pretty how town' is a moving and formally beautiful meditation on the stifling expectations of popular society versus the individual's need for authenticity and love. The relationship of "anyone" and "noone" is set against the "women and men" of the town whose lives are defined by negatives ("they sowed their isn't they reaped their same"). The deliberately simple language and use of refrain gives the poem a fable-like quality and succeeds in being both sophisticated and childlike, a classic Cummings paradox. 'next to of course god America i' is a virtuoso example of monologue written in a sonnet form. Cummings' bravura performance brings out the clichd nature of the old patriot's ramblings: by running together a series of sound-bites Cummings skewers brilliantly the essential meaninglessness of the speaker's political and cultural assumptions.