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

Many Arthur Miller scholars concentrate upon 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 minds encounter harsh patterns and constitutings of the faltering American Dream. plane some of Miller's later characters (Lyman Felt and John Frick) struggle with matters that initially appear to be personally, socially, and culturally motivated. However, these regards ultimately force the characters to face metaphysical and sometimes even cosmological questions: the nature of the universe in which the social and familial individual is placed, the disposition that present itselfs as the isolated social individual stand in front ofs the particulars of physical reality and nature, and the connections between the sensible world and individual sensibility. Archibald Randolph Ammons, in his work of poetry entitled Brink Road: metrical compositions published in 1996 just five years before his death, considers in several piece of poetrys the same metaphysical issues that appear thus noticeably in Miller's works. As Goldwin Smith Professor of metrical composition 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 metrical compositions in Brink Road are in the proces 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 Steven profoundly influenced his fashions 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 exhibit into metaphysical challenges. Ammons likewise discloses his association in his rhyme with Ibsen-like characters similar to those base in Coleridge and Stevens (eg 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 metrical composition is a Walk" from place in Motion, Ammons echoes Coleridge's Biographia Literaria in his assertion that, although the poetic persona repeatedly encounters the antithesis of logic in the world, metrical composition "can create a vehicle, at one time 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 real process of the protagonist moving toward awareness of the real world and the potential reconciliation with that world rise consistently in both Miller's plays and Ammons's metrical compositions This potential reconciliation-always possible in the works of the pair 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, on the contrary that protagonist always discovers resolution and reconciliation, level when such resolution ends in death (eg John Proctor and Willy Loman). plane though Willy admits to Ben that he have feelings temporary about himself ("Ben, nothing's working without I don't know what to do" in Act 2 of Salesman) and despite his uncertainty and vacillation, Willy is more resolv than the characters of O'Neill's lengthy Day's Journey Into Night who watch in bafflement as Mary Tyrone retrogrades into an inescapable past. John Proctor strides purposefully towards metaphysical uncertainty, his death upon the scaffold, but his analyze is more tangible than the confusion of Williams's wandering and missing Tom Wingfield and the intoxicated and faltering Brick. The characters in Albee's and Beckett's plays oftentimes find themselves suspended in a realm where no resolution is possible; a pair is perpetually trapped in a verbal prison (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) the distinction between the tangible form and the imaginary one is at no time 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 regarded with the familial or social composings of the metaphysical constructs that appear in their plays while Miller, like Ammons, places his characters in raises where objects ("things") define that build and define the parameters of by what mode the protagonists behave. O'Neill's and Williams's characters are moving [i]or[/i] part of to the other and positioning themselves in metaphysical microcosms in which the possible imagistic particulars are modules that often adorn the views Miller's objects, like the "things" in Ammons's metrical compositions become the center of the microcosm, defining the real consciousness of the protagonist. For Willy Loman, the failing existences of the modern world (the refrigerator and the automobile) become the core of by what mode his consciousness operates. Similarly, the Franz brothers' relationship to the furniture as the couple symbol and as concrete thing perceived in The Price defines their psyches as well as their past. flat the potential "bug" in the ceiling in The Archbishop's Ceiling becomes an thing that characterizes the behavior of the room's individuals. This reliance upon the presence of "things" to demarcate the particularity of each character's psyche come into views noticeably in Miller and Ammons while phenomenons in a Williams or O'Neill play function differently in the confines of the metaphysical fabricate that those plays postulate.