Ee Cummings In Our Town

Playwright Thornton Wilder and poet e. e. cummings are portraying ordinary life in a small town in the play Our Town and in the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” Both, the play and poem were written about at the same period. The towns in both the play and poem can be related to any city in the country. The poem and play take the readers through the similar themes of the passage of time, love, and death, which are an ordinary life that is monotonous and ultimately unmemorable.
Both authors Thornton Wilder and e. e. cummings are modern writers who applied a combination of ironies to express the final passage of the time and death. Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in a colloquial style, which makes the story more believable and down-to-earth …show more content…
In the play, “Three years have gone by” without any significant changes except “Summers and winters have cracked the mountains a little bit more and the rains have brought down some of the dirt” (47). The Stage Manager explains, “Almost everybody in the world gets married” (48). George and Emily are not an exception in this town. They grow up, and during high school years, they fell in love with each other. As soon as they graduated from high school, they became married. Mrs. Gibbs thinks that everyone should get married because “people are meant to go through life two by two” (54). Similarly, in the poem, Noone fall in love with Anyone: “that noone loved him more by more” (ln.12). Just like in the play, there is a wedding in town: “someones married their everyones” (ln. 17). Someone and Noone lived ordinary everyday life. They had happy and sad days, wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night: “laughed their cryings and did their dance / (sleep wake hope and then) they” (18-19). B. J. Hunt, a literary critic, describes the poem “increasingly hints of monotony and life's insignificance” ("anyone" 11). Equally, in the play and poem the marriage seems like being something