Historical Context  After he graduated from Harvard in 1916,
cummings moved to New York City, where he stayed, with time away
during World War I, for most of his life. Cummings probably
wrote “i was sitting in mcsorley’s” around 1917, when he was
living in Greenwich Village in New York City, part of that time
with his friend William Slater Brown, whom he met during the
war. Cummings’s biographer Charles Norman notes that cummings
frequented McSorley’s, which he describes as follows:  It has
two rooms, each with its individual admonitory sign, “Be Good or
Be Gone.” The walls are crowded with photographs and lithographs
in which a vanished city dwells, and dead, buxom ladies and
derbied men. The room in front has the bar, but the room in back
boasts a famous lady of smooth and beautiful nudeness. . . .
Here writers, artists, and laborers still meet on equal terms,
without distractions, to sluice down amber quarts in the abiding
gloom.  Cummings was a flaneur (an idle, man-about-town) of
sorts, roaming the city