A. R. Ammons and Arthur Miller: Unexpected Metaphysical Connections

Ammons acknowledges that poems offer "representative models of behavior" (Set in Motion, "Poetry is Action" 33) that assist the individual in discovering the place of the isolated psyche in the universe, much in the same way that Miller in "The Nature of Tragedy" (in Theater Essays) discusses the ways in which the tragedy of the individual leads to knowledge of one's place in both society and the cosmos (9). In an interview with William Walsh in 1989, Ammons concedes that his poetry often portrays a persona in solitude because of the essential "element of loneliness in each person" (Set in Motion 65). Miller scholars recognize the recurrent loneliness of his characters (Willy Loman, Eddie Carbone, Patricia Hamilton, John Proctor), all placed in a confrontation with cosmological and sociological influences that exacerbate that sense of isolation.

In wrestling with his guilt and in his sense of separation from his family, Willy Loman demolishes the "boundaries between now and then," as Miller aptly describes in his introduction to the Collected Plays (139). In their sense of disconnection from "other," Ammon's personae likewise find themselves in metaphysical realms where past and present, reality and fantasy, sensory perception and imaginative meanderings, all conjoin to form a portrait of a dramatic poetic character that is similar to many of Miller's classical characters. Miller discusses in Timebends how Willy's conflicted state of mind, his vacillation between past and present, is both lyrical and dramatic (188); Ammons represents in his poetic personae the verse embodiment and counterpart of Willy's isolated psychical lyricism. Similarly, as the Franz brothers in The Price depart each other trapped within the perpetuation of their illusions about cause and blame (Timebends 542), their sense of isolation resounds like a lyrical elegy that echoes the metaphysical laments of many of Ammons's personae.

In his analysis of Focus and other Miller works, Stephen Wade emphasizes how Miller "repeatedly creates a macrocosm and a microcosm which interact creatively" and how "Miller's drama is in its most directly communicative form when the philosophical dimension is lucidly present" (97). Often in a Miller play, the microcosmic psyche of the protagonist discovers itself floating rootlessly and confusedly within the corridors of a macrocosmic construct that defies and eludes definition or categorization. John Proctor in his battle against the seemingly confining but ultimately massive walls of Puritanism, Willy Loman "boxed" behind the tenements of the city whose buildings both restrict and beckon, the characters in The Archbishop's Ceiling who recognize in their entrapment the presence of "other" outside their room-all these characters are much like Crispin in Wallace Stevens's "The Comedian as the Letter C." They make their ways along the parameters of a supposedly definitive path while metaphysical incongruities and philosophical inscrutabilities surround them in their journeys.