Voice, Witness, and the Stage After 1945

The idea

Postwar American poetry and drama share one problem: a public vocabulary that no longer carried private truth, and the period's whole formal history is a search for a voice that could. The witness lays the poetry out in three overlapping camps, traditional, idiosyncratic and experimental, and the decisive break came from the middle of it. Robert Lowell, the Boston formalist who had already won a Pulitzer for metered verse, published Life Studies in nineteen fifty-nine and admitted in a poem that his mind was not right, and the witness calls that a watershed that opened the way for younger writers. His students Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton went further: Plath wrote the Ariel poems against the clock through a London winter and was dead at thirty, and the anchor is careful that her Nazi imagery depicts an emotion rather than reporting a life. Elizabeth Bishop held the opposite line, describing an armadillo or a fish with such exactness that the feeling arrives without being stated, and locking grief inside a villanelle's nineteen lines because the form restrains what would otherwise spill. On the experimental end, Ginsberg's "Howl" was seized by Customs, defended in court for its literary merit, and carried the Beats to fame on a jazz aesthetic of first thought, best thought. Black poets built their own institutions rather than joining anyone's camp: Brooks took the first Pulitzer awarded an African American and later published with Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, which printed Etheridge Knight's poems from an Indiana prison cell, while Hayden refused the label African American poet and paid for it. Adrienne Rich started in Auden's delicacy and ended in political conviction. On the stage the same search ran through family: Williams asked his stage directions for mood rather than furniture and gave Blanche DuBois three masks to hold, Miller gave a salesman of undergarments the shape of a Greek tragedy and used Salem to say what the nineteen fifties would not let him say directly, Hansberry put a welcome committee at a Black family's new front door, and Albee brought European absurdism in to expose a marriage's shared fiction.