In the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford Upon Avon, in England, there is an inscription that I especially like. On the tombstone marking the burial place of William Shakespeare are the words "William Shakespeare Poet." This is not because he was the author of poetry, which he was, or because he wrote in that most basic rhythm of the English language, iambics, but because his was an art whose language, whose characters, whose metaphoric allusiveness lifted present fact into universal significance. I also take that inscription to be a reminder of the origins of drama, born out of the rib of poetry, to be an indication of the metaphoric force of the theater. I also warm to the implication that in Shakespeare's age the title "poet" was not only a badge of honor but the mark of a man seen as a chronicler of the age and a force in the land.
An odd way to start a lecture on Arthur Miller, you might think, a man who, especially in this country, is so often praised, and occasionally decried, for what is taken to be his realism, a realism expressed through the authentic prose of a salesman, a longshoreman, a businessman. This, after all, is the Arthur Miller who observed that in America a poet is seen as being "like a barber trying to erect a skyscraper." He is, in other words, regarded as being "of no consequence." Yet I want to suggest not merely that Arthur Miller is no simple realist and hasn't been for fifty years but that he is incontestably a poet, one who sees the private and public worlds as one, who is a chronicler of the age and a creator of metaphors.
In an essay on realism, written in 1997, Miller made a remark that I find compellingly interesting. "Willy Loman," he said, "is not a real person. He is if I may say so a figure in a poem." That poem is not simply the language he or the other characters speak, though this is shaped, charged with a muted eloquence of a kind which he has said was not uncommon in their class half a century or more ago. Nor is it purely a product of the stage metaphors which, like Tennessee Williams, he presents as correlatives of the actions he elaborates. The poem is the play itself and hence the language, the mise en scène, the characters who glimpse the lyricism of a life too easily ensnared in the prosaic, a life which aspires to metaphoric force.
