In this course we are going to have two sections, Drama and Poetry.
- Concerning drama: we are going to study two plays:
1- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
2- A Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
- As for the part concerning American poetry, we are going to study some poems by two American poets:
1- Emily Dickenson
2- Robert Frost
- Death of a Salesman is considered to be the greatest play Arthur Miller has ever written. When we read this play we will feel the characters; sympathize with them or make judgments about their actions in general, that is, we are going to react upon their actions and feelings in the play.
- In this play there are four main characters:
Willy Loman (The father and the supporter of the Family)
Linda Loman (The mother and the wife of Willy)
Biff, Happy (The two sons)
* Miller's concept of responsibility:
He was accused of being a member of the communist party and insulting the congress. He was interrogated by many officials and was asked to name names of his colleagues. He told them that he wasn't a member of this party and even if he was he wouldn't give them any name.
- according to Miller: a human being doesn't exist alone and he should have the sense of responsibility for:
- Himself : he should be responsible for his actions.
- Family: his actions will affect his family and he should be aware of that
- Society: he should care about his society and do anything to help
- Humanity at large: all his actions and deeds should be in the interest of humanity in general.

 
Important note: In the new addition of the play, act 1 and act 2 are missing 2 pages: Requiem, Mass for the Death. Try to get them.

 
* Crucial moments in the play:
- Almost all of these moments take place in Act Two, but of course the audience is prepared to such moments in Act One.
1- The meeting between Howard and Willy:
Here we see the shock after Willy gets fired. Things became clear and it was the beginning of the end.
2- The meeting with Bill Oliver.
3- The Betrayal scene.
4- The restaurant scene.
5- The confrontation scene and the resolution.
- So, in general we can say that Death of a Salesman is the play of father and son relationship.
* A sample comment: (Important): p:5 : Willy: "I was driving…strange thoughts"
    The speaker of these lines is Willy Loman. The images created in the passage interact with previous images suggesting the exhaustion of Willy and the domination of external forces. The road symbolizes Willy's life, and the car stands for his soul. As Miller suggests in this passage, the road and soul have lost their meaning. In this passage Miller undermines the failure of the American Dream. Willy Loman in this passage is a man who is contemplating deteriorating situation in life and telling audiences about his prospective death. Concerning the syntax of the passage, Willy's sentences tend towards being lengthy portraying his need for contemplation and description. In fact, the use of the progressive tense in the passage offers Willy's sentences a sense of vitality and vividness: 'I was driving', 'I was observing', 'looking', 'going off', 'dreaming'. The lexis of the passage also highlights Willy Loman's longings and dreamy situation. Nouns such as: 'trees', 'scenery', 'the sun' indicate his need for the world of the dream; adjectives like: 'fine', 'beautiful' and 'warm' strengthen his need for the dream, while verbs like: 'going off', 'forgot', 'gone the other way' suggest the world of reality.

* The American Dream and Death of a Salesman:- Success is a requirement American's make of life. Because it seems magical and explicable, as it is to Willy, it can be considered the right of every free citizen, even those with no notable talents. The citizen may logically ask, if Edison, Goodrich and Grange can make it, why not me?, why not Willy Loman?. Miller uses the myth of material success in his plays in order to state something significant about American society and its moral system. He can be considered a social dramatist in the sense that his drama exposes the ills of society and makes people aware that that there is something seriously wrong with the system through his dramatization of the dream of material success, Miller examines the declining ideals and way of life of the middle class in America. In general, Miller warns that the pursuit of the dream of material success can endanger man's moral existence. In the America of Miller's play, success is judged by the extent of personal wealth and the individual's initiative in poring himself more economically capable than others. Thus, success is external and visible.
   
- If we go back to the opening of the play we notice that we, as audiences, are prepared to see someone like Willy Loman. The images, buildings, colors and music itself are all presented to prepare us for the appearance of the main character. So, after all that we can't say we are surprised to see this old salesman who is carrying 60 years of exhaustion and tiredness. We notice that Miller is quite skillful in presenting these images; he doesn't present a young man who embodies the dream of material success, but an old man who is tired from life, tired from trying so hard to achieve his aim. This indicates that Arthur Miller doesn't really believe in the American Dream. He believes that this dream has turned into a nightmare and Willy Loman embodies this nightmare. In other words, Miller expresses the failure of the American Dream and that's why he uses Willy Loman; a man who is at the edge of collapsing and destruction.
   
- The success myth in Death of a Salesman, in the hands of the playwright, becomes the model for the events of the plot, the situation and the character of the hero, but Miller uses this model in order to subvert it. His play is an anti-myth, the rags-to-riches Formula in reverse so that it becomes the story of a failure in terms of success, or the story of the failure of the success myth. The events of the play are a mirror image of the hero's progress. Willy's history begins at the end of the line; instead of the appearance of a young man, an exhausted salesman enters, carrying along with his sample cases, 60 years of struggle. The subsequent events show him failing to overcome each obstacle, just as he has failed to achieve the success he has been pursuing his lifelong. He returns from a trip without making a single sale; he traces the boss for a Newyork job and a salary raise and is fired for his pain. Willy finishes by facing the harsh fact that his whole life has been a lie.
   
- In Death of a Salesman Miller traces the negative and destructive consequences of the success dream. The play, therefore, portrays Willy Loman's blind pursuit of material success and his inevitable destruction in the process. The play concerns the success ethic which imposes false values on the life of Miller's salesman. Miller says, "I didn't write Death of a salesman to announce some new American, or an old American. Willy Loman is, I think, a person who embodies in himself some of the terrible conflicts running through the streets of America today". Willy's conflict derives from his belief that success depends on superficial personal qualities and the cultivation of commercial relationships. Unfortunately, Willy fails to realize that his belief does not guarantee success in a highly competitive society.

 
* Tennessee Williams (1911-1983):
He was born in Mississippi and his major works were:
•Battles of Angels (1940)
•The Glass Menagerie (1944)
•A Street Car Named Desire (1947)
•Summer and Smoke (1948)
•The Rose Tattoo (1951)
•Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
•Orpheus Descending (1957)
•Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
•Period of Adjustment (1960)
•The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1962)
•Small Craft Warnings (1972)
•Something Cloudy Something Clear (1981)

The action revolves around the visit of Blanche Du Bois to her sister Stella, who lives in New Orleans, near the stop of the street car named desire with her brutish husband, Stanley Kowalski. Blanche has an appearance of a lady-like  and constantly refers to her early life at the family estate  of Belle Reve. Bewildered  by her new environment and by the antagonism  of her brother-in-law , she turns to his friend, Mitch, for consolation  and company. Stanley, however, learns that Blanche is not the Southern Belle she purports  to be, and tells Mitch that she is in fact a lonely alcoholic  who has been forced into bankruptcy  and who has lost her job because of an affair with a young boy who reminded her of her dead husband. Blanche's antagonistic relationship with Stanley culminates  in his raping her. She tells Stella, but Stella doesn't believe her, and at the end of the play, she is taken into psychiatric care .

* Ambivalence  in Death of a Salesman and A Street Car Named Desire:

Both Miller and Williams are concerned with a specific cultural environment, and both of them concentrate on an interpretation  of that environment for the audience. Thus, in Death of a Salesman, Miller dramatizes the death of a myth ; in A Street Car Named Desire Williams deals with the same theme. The Death of Willy Loman represents the passing of an American dream; the conflict of Blanche Du Bois is a legend about the passing of the Old South.
As their names indicate, Willy and Blanche represent types and express those cultural attitudes that have granted the type. Just as Willy brings the values of the drummer into a hostile business world, so Blanche is a sensitive, romantic soul who tries to adjust  to the melting-pot environment of a big city, New Orleans.
Though the plays deal with the death of a myth, the attitudes that characterize the Salesman and the Southern Belle are still affecting American society. So, the audience recognizes Willy and Blanche and sympathizes with their predicament. Though the individual spectator may consciously reject the attitude of the Salesman or the Southern Belle, The response of emotions can't be so easily controlled. Miller and Williams have seized on situations to which the audience responds in this ambivalent way.

 
color=#000000]Williams, in his play, talks about the failure of the Southern Tradition represented through the character of Blanche Du Bois. This tradition is going to fail because it will be faced by Stanley Kowalski; the mentality of the low man. This failure will happen because Blanche, as a southerner, can't recognize the passage of time. She can't cope  with the changes of time. Williams brought her on stage to show us that she doesn't understand that there are new changes of time. There are two kinds of time in the play: the remembered time, when Blanche remembers the past, the family, the house and the friends. Then there is the suspended time; the actual time[/color]

 
* Page 41: Blanche: 'He acts like an animal…with the brutes'
* Page 4: [Blanche comes around the corner…that suggests a moth]
* Page 6: [Blanche sits down in a chair… in front of the table]
* Page 7: Blanche: 'Now, then, let me look at you…slip from her grasp'
* Page 9: Blanche: 'Well, I never had your…you left us'
* Page 12: Blanche: 'I, I took the blows in…in bed with your – Polak!'
* Page 14: [More laughter and shouts…smiles at them]
* Page 45: Blanche: 'I never was hard…. I'm fading now'

* General points:
Williams, "a Southern writing about the south", works with the complex of attitudes that crystallized  in the myth. Among these attitudes is an acute  sense of time and place. The Southerner, like Blanche Du Bois, has got an attachment to time and place. As this attachment to the place and land becomes less and less a reality, the Southerner becomes aware that there is no compromise  between the old modes of southern life and progress.
The image of the past continues to exert  pressure on southern character. The tendency  towards unreality, toward the romantic is reflected in the physical world. Blanche generally has two facets. She is the fragile  version of heightened sensibilities, modest , graceful  and delicate , she is also the adventuress who flirts, dares and teases .
The action involves a conflict between the Old and the New. Williams begins by situating the play in an old section of New Orleans, a city with cosmopolitan  air, but with an Old South tradition. The neighborhood is mixed white, black and brown; references to the bar around the corner, the bowling alley and fritz's garage complete the lower-middle-class atmosphere. This setting makes up the actual dimension, the world in which Stanley is at home.
When Blanche comes on the scene, another dimension enters with her, the world of the Old plantation. She arrives from the ancestral  territory of the Du Bois, the rural  community of Laurel , Mississippi. She brings memories of the family home, now lost in the inevitable  march  of time. The image of the big, white clumped  house, the Acers of land, tea parties, clothes and luncheons  are contrasted with the crowded flat in the run-down  section of the city.

 
Page 40-41: Blanche: 'He acts like…with the brutes'
The speaker of these lines is Blanche Du Bois. The passage clearly portrays  the underlying  factor which creates Blanche's dilemma  in life. Her whole life was built on waging  lost wars, on losing all the battles she is fighting. Williams in this passage, indirectly and implicitly , suggests the destruction of Blanche at the end of the play. Thus, audiences learn through Blanche's images of the alternative world she portrays, that she is doomed  in a world inhabited by Stanley. The passage highlights Blanche's ability to use language. Blanche's art of articulation is apparently clear in this passage. The syntax of the passage consists of sentences that show the sophistication  of the speaker. Blanche, a well-educated lady manifests  an ability to construct compound sentences . The sentences Blanche employs to describe Stanley's behavior and acts usually use simple present tense: to concentrate regularity and frequency ''He acts…has…eats…moves…talks…''. Concerning the vocabulary of the passage, Williams takes great interest in choosing words that denotes  Blanche's own world and the world she is fighting against. Blanche's references to Stanley's barbarism are made emphatic  by the use of verbal sentences whose verbs indicate Stanley's vulgarity  and brutality : ''strike …grunting …swilling …gnawing … hulking … growling…snatching…''. The lexis of the passage also illuminates  the scene of contrast between Blanche and Stanley. This is evident  through Blanche's reference through: ''tender… feelings… poetry… music''.

 
* Page 45: Blanche: 'I never was hard…I'm fading now'
* Page 51: Blanche: 'Honey, it wasn't the kiss…she'll be lost.'
* Page 52: Blanche: 'Voulez-vous avec… honey…'
* Page 54: Mitch: 'just give me…It's just – well'
* Page 55: Mitch: 'Well, I – don't see…you and me Blanche?'
* Page 60: Stanley: 'Honey, I told you…Out-of-bounds?'
* Page 65: Blanche: 'Apparently Mr. Kowalski…clear your places'.
* Page 72: Blanche: 'What are you leading…Their dead men.'
* Page 74: Blanche: 'What do you want…Fire! Fire!'
* Page 85: Blanche: 'I can smell the sea…first lover's eyes!'
* Page 89: [He takes off his…the kindness of strangers].

 
* A Comment Sample: A new technique  in commenting:
* Page 12: Blanche: 'I, I took the blows in…in bed with your – Polak!'
The speaker of these lines is Blanche Du Bois. In this passage Blanche reveals  more than just the outward  truth of her family's dying out or the loss of Belle Reve. Her horror  at the reality of death, her resentment  of what she perceives  a Stella's disloyalty, her sense of guilt, and her defensiveness all images in this passage. The images that Blanche uses to describe the debts  which haunt  her, indicate her melodramatic  turn of mind; her concluding accusation of Stella hints at the preoccupation  with sexual that has driven Blanche from Laurel and will contribute to her eventual breakdown . The sharp repetition of "I" and "saw" emphasizes the potency  of Blanche's point of view. When combined with the plentifulness  of exclamation marks, this repetition reveals the quick temper beneath Blanche's cool and white appearance and predicts the emotional shift which will end her visit to her sister.
* Note: This method in commenting can be followed in the exam by students who don't prefer the first method. That is, you can comment on a passage without mentioning the syntax and lexis.

* American Poetry:
*Emily Dickenson:
1.Her subject matter: Emily Dickenson's subject matter can be subdivided roughly as follows: description of nature, the definition of moral experience and mystical experience.
2.Her tragic vision: In fact, it is her tragic vision which gives her a high rank as a poet. She knows that she can't penetrate the unknowable or comprehend the deepest mysteries but she insists on asking the questions. In her poetry, readers see the anguish of the Shakespeare who wrote King Lear. She reveals an agonizing sense of ironic contrasts, of the weight of suffering of the human predicament in which man is mocked and destroyed. She shows a keen sense of the limits of reason, order and justice in human as well as divine relationships.

 
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes

 
After great pain, a formal feeling comes__
The nerves sit ceremonious , like Tombs __
The Stiff  heart questions was it He, that bore
And yesterday, or centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round__
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought __
A Wooden way
Regardless grown
A Quartz  contentment , like a stone__

This is the hour of lead __
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons, recollect the snow__
First – chill  – then stupor  – then the letting go__

 
1.Three Stages of the Ceremony:
This is Miss Dickenson's most remarkable poem rendering  the extinction  of consciousness by pain in terms of a funeral . Its three stanzas shadow  forth three stages of a familiar ceremony ; the formal service, the tread  of pall-bearers  and the final lowering into a grave.
[color=#800000]2.Some Great Sorrow or Mental Pain:
The pain is obviously not a physical one; it is some great sorrow  or mental pain which leaves the mind numbed . "The nerves", it is implied , are like a group of people after a funeral sitting in the parlour  in a formal hush . Then the poetess changes the image by adding "like Tombs". "The nerves" are thus compared to two different things, but each of the comparisons contributes  to the same effect, and indeed they are closely related; people, dressed in black and sitting round a room after a funeral, may be stated to resemble  tombs. The reference to tombs is a good symbol for a person who has just suffered great pain, because a tomb has to a certain degree the qualities of deadness "quietness, stillness" and of formality "ceremony".[/color]
3.The Imagery of the Poem:
The imagery is characterized through the first line of the last stanza by the position of a common quality, the quality of still lifelessness. For instance, "The heart is stiff", the feet walk a "wooden" way, the contentment is a "quartz" one, and the hour is that of "lead". The insistence  on this type imagery is very important in confirming the sense of numbed consciousness  which is made more explicit  by the statement that the feet move mechanically and are "regardless" of where they go. These lines are bound  together, not only by the imagery which springs from the result of grief, but also by the fact that the poetess is stating in a series what happens to the parts of the body; nerves, heart and feet.
4.An Implied Idea:
"He" in line three refers to Christ. The heart, obsessed  with pain and having lost the sense of time and place, asks whether it was Christ who bore the Cross . The question is abrupt  and elliptic  as though uttered at a moment of pain, and the heart asks whether it is not experiencing the pain which Christ experienced, and whether the Crucifixion  took place yesterday or centuries ago. And behind these questions lies the implication that pain is a constant part of the human lot . The implied figure of a funeral makes the heart's questions about the Crucifixion come as an appropriate one, and the quality of suffering makes the connection implied between its own suffering and that on the Cross.
5.Pain, an unavoidable aspect of human life:
This poem is perhaps Emily Dickinson's finest poem about pain. In this poem, the soul's numbed response after a profound  shock illustrates  the fundamental  law that pain is an unavoidable aspect  of human existence. The poem's opening statement is surprising because great pain doesn't bring disorder  or hysteria.

 
Further in Summer than the Birds

Further in summer than the Birds
Pathetic from the Grass
A minor nation celebrates
Its an unobtrusive Mass.

No Ordinance be seen
So, gradual the Grace
A pensive custom it becomes
Enlarging loneliness

Antiquest felt at Noon
When August Bringing low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify

Remit as yet no Grace
No furrow on the Glow
Yet a druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now.

 
1.The poem as a good example of her nature poetry:
The poem is a treatment  of the well-known insect, the cricket . It shows her fascination  of the odd  creatures in nature and the mysterious passage of summer into winter. She once remarked that "autumn is among us and the cricket sings in the morning, now, a most pathetic conduct". Thus, linking the cricket's song with the sadness of seasonal change, as in the poem. Basically, the poem records her response to the monotonous  sharp sound of the crickets on a hot august noon near the end of summer. The tone throughout is hushed and solemn , filled with a sense of longing  by religious undertones . The image of the cricket is transformed into a symbol of the estrangement  and sorrow that man feels with the approach of winter.
2.Man's separation from Nature:
The crickets exist further in summer because they live hidden in the soil , close to the essence  of nature, while the birds build in the trees, inhabiting  the sky and remaining longer into autumn. Unlike the beautiful lyrics of the birds, the songs of the crickets are pathetic and often ignored. The cricket's song is also dependent  on changes of temperature drops , the crickets become sluggish  and their song diminishes . So, because of their passions' season , the majority of them die soon after the fall mating  during the first long spell of freezing weather. In a sense, then in a sense, their mating predicts their coming death. So, it can be compared to the sacrifice of the mass, where Christ's love perpetuates  the death-sacrifice of Calvary  by the transubstantiation  of the bread and wine into his body and blood. The religious significance of the act is deepened by terms like: ''ordinance ", "canticle ", "Druidic ". Yet, the interested human listener is still alienated  from the crickets' massage. What does sound in the human soul is a "pensive custom", one that saddens and brings introspection . The song of the crickets increases Man's fundamental  loneliness, since he is excluded from full participation in their ritual . In a sense, their song shows the separation of Man from Nature. Thus, Man can perceive that his isolation is not a distinctive phenomenon but cosmic and universal.