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.” The play and poem were written during the same period. In both the play and poem, the towns and townspeople, could represent any city in the country. Although both authors see love and family in the passage of life, they both also see it ultimately as insignificant, boring and unmemorable.
Both authors Thornton Wilder and E. E. Cummings are modern writers who applied a combination of ironies to express the passage of time in peoples’ lives, which ultimately ends with death. Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in a colloquial style, which makes the story more believable with a matter-of-fact…show more content… Neither author portrays either town as having anything significant or memorable in it. Wilder and Cummings begin their play and poem with the introduction of the town and characters to the audience and readers. The Stage Manager in the play and the speaker in the poem are omniscient; they know everything about the town and people living in it. In the play, the Stage Manger introduces the audience to the town which is located in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, and then he shows the layout of the town such as the “Main Street,” churches, and the two houses: “This is our doctor's house,-Doc Gibbs’. … and this is Editor Webb’s house” (4-5). He describes the town as if it is familiar to the listeners, yet not worth describing. Likewise, in the poem, in the first two lines “anyone lived in a pretty how town / (with up so floating many bells down)” (ln. 1-2), the speaker introduces the readers to an individual named Anyone and the nice-looking town that he lives in, where the churches are located also (“anyone lived” 3). Wilder and Cummings describe similar towns, but nothing extraordinary happens in those…show more content… Townspeople, in the play and poem, are busy with their daily lives and they do not stop to reflect on life until it is too late. While Cummings’ poem only explains the circle of life with the season’s changes and the monotony of it all, Wilder’s play goes deeper to express that life is not just boring, but most humans are unaware and blind about the meaninglessness of life. Wilder’s play conveys the message that there is life after the death, but the dead forget the life that they lived. Additionally, after looking back at their lives, the dead realize that while they are living, they did not appreciate the wonderful life they had. In the end, both the play and poem characters’ lives are monotonous and, in the end, are not just meaningless, but also
