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A. R. Ammons and Arthur Miller: Unexpected Metaphysical Connections
American Drama, Winter 2006 by Castellitto, George P
Many Arthur Miller scholars concentrate on his recurrent concern with post-Depression and post-World War II cultural, sociological, and economic issues that beset the protagonists of his dramas; the Willy Lomans and Eddie Carbones of Miller's plays are archetypal American characters whose psyches and souls encounter harsh patterns and components of the faltering American Dream. Even some of Miller's later characters (Lyman Felt and John Frick) wrestle with matters that initially appear to be personally, socially, and culturally motivated. However, these concerns ultimately force the characters to confront metaphysical and sometimes even cosmological questions: the nature of the universe in which the social and familial individual is placed, the disposition that occurs as the isolated social individual confronts the particulars of physical reality and nature, and the connections between the sensible world and individual sensibility. Archibald Randolph Ammons, in his book of poetry entitled Brink Road: Poems, published in 1996 just five years before his death, considers in several poems the same metaphysical issues that appear so noticeably in Miller's works. As Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University for many years, Ammons assuredly read and savored the works of Miller. Interestingly, the personae and protagonists (sometimes antagonists) in Ammon's poems in Brink Road are in the process of challenging the same metaphysical forces that plague individuals in Miller's plays.
In his essays and interviews, Ammons admits that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wallace Stevens profoundly influenced his modes of poetic expression as well as his metaphysical theories concerning the stance of the protagonist/antagonist character as dramatic persona versus the inscrutable universe that sprawls before that persona. Miller acknowledges his indebtedness to Ibsen whose dramatic personae grapple with forces that are initially psychological and sociological and that eventually develop into metaphysical challenges. Ammons likewise discloses his association in his poetry with Ibsen-like characters similar to those found in Coleridge and Stevens (e.g., The Ancient Mariner and Crispin), individuals that discern that specific behavior and logic do not explain nor mitigate the essential contradictoriness of the real world. In his essay "A Poem is a Walk" from Set in Motion, Ammons echoes Coleridge's Biographia Literaria in his assertion that, although the poetic persona often encounters the antithesis of logic in the world, poetry "can create a vehicle, at once concrete and universal . . . that is capable of... bringing us the experience of a 'real' world that is also a reconciled, a unified real world" (13).
The very process of the protagonist moving toward awareness of the real world and the potential reconciliation with that world emerge consistently in both Miller's plays and Ammons's poems. This potential reconciliation-always possible in the works of both Ammons and Miller-does not appear as noticeably in the works of playwrights like O'Neill, Williams, Beckett, and Albee. The Ammons and Miller protagonist may become suspended between the reality of the actual world and the indefinability of the metaphysical realm, but that protagonist always discovers resolution and reconciliation, even when such resolution ends in death (e.g., John Proctor and Willy Loman). Even though Willy admits to Ben that he feels temporary about himself ("Ben, nothing's working out. I don't know what to do" in Act 2 of Salesman) and despite his uncertainty and vacillation, Willy is more resolved than the characters of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night who watch in bafflement as Mary Tyrone recedes into an inescapable past. John Proctor strides purposefully towards metaphysical uncertainty, his death on the scaffold, but his resolve is more tangible than the confusion of Williams's wandering and lost Tom Wingfield and the intoxicated and faltering Brick. The characters in Albee's and Beckett's plays often find themselves suspended in a realm where no resolution is possible; a couple is perpetually trapped in a verbal prison (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), the distinction between the tangible structure and the imaginary one is never resolved (Tiny Alice), or characters wait for an indefinable visitor (Waiting for Godot).
Moreover, the protagonists in the plays of Beckett, Williams, and O'Neill are more concerned with the familial or social components of the metaphysical constructs that appear in their plays while Miller, like Ammons, places his characters in constructs where objects ("things") define that construct and define the parameters of how the protagonists behave. O'Neill's and Williams's characters are moving through and positioning themselves in metaphysical microcosms in which the possible imagistic objects are modules that often adorn the scenes. Miller's objects, like the "things" in Ammons's poems, become the center of the microcosm, defining the very consciousness of the protagonist. For Willy Loman, the failing objects of the modern world (the refrigerator and the automobile) become the core of how his consciousness operates. Similarly, the Franz brothers' relationship to the furniture as both symbol and as concrete object in The Price defines their psyches as well as their past. Even the potential "bug" in the ceiling in The Archbishop's Ceiling becomes an object that characterizes the behavior of the room's individuals. This reliance on the presence of "things" to demarcate the particularity of each character's psyche occurs noticeably in Miller and Ammons while objects in a Williams or O'Neill play function differently in the confines of the metaphysical construct that those plays postulate.
