Postwar Poetry and Drama

This is Unit Seventeen of American Literature, part two of two: the Beats, the politics, and the whole of the postwar stage. Part one ended with poems written in an Indiana prison cell. This part carries the same governing idea to its payoff: everyone here is looking for a voice that the public words had lost, and they look in different places. Lucille Clifton finds it in poems under twenty lines with no capitals and no punctuation, so a reader has to look deeper into the words. Ginsberg finds it in Whitman's long line, reads it to a shocked audience in San Francisco, has the book seized by Customs, and wins in court on the grounds of its literary merit, which carries the Beats to fame on a jazz aesthetic of first thought, best thought. Adrienne Rich begins in Auden's delicacy and ends in political conviction, having realized her personal situation was political. Martin Luther King writes a letter from a jail cell that this exam reads as literature. And on the stage the same search runs through family: a mood asked for instead of a set, a belle with three masks, a salesman given the shape of a Greek tragedy. By the end you will be able to describe Clifton's line and Ginsberg's debt. To account for Rich's change and Wright's turn. To read King as a stylist. To place Williams's method and Blanche's masks. And to account for Miller, Hansberry, Albee and Wilson.

Seven entries: a small poem with large interiors, a courtroom victory, a restraint given up for conviction, and a meter abandoned.

Small poems, with large interiors.

AML 1626 Lucille Clifton's Short Line

Clifton was discovered by Langston Hughes, published *Good Times* in nineteen sixty-nine, and wrote brief, incisive poems, most under twenty lines, in plain diction with no capitalization or punctuation. The anchor says the choice forces a reader to look deeper into her words. The missing punctuation is a deliberate method.

One reading, and a decade turned.

AML 1627 Allen Ginsberg and "Howl"

Ginsberg read "Howl" in nineteen fifty-four to a shocked audience at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, and City Lights published it in nineteen fifty-six. It opens by saying he has seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. Customs seized the book as indecent.

Long lines, Whitman for company.

AML 1628 "A Supermarket in California" and the Whitman Debt

The anchor describes his style as long free Whitmanesque lines that find rhythm in everyday American speech and carry shockingly personal confessions. "A Supermarket in California", from the same book, walks through a neon supermarket in the company of Walt Whitman. The debt is to Whitman's line rather than to his optimism.

A courtroom win, a jazz aesthetic.

AML 1629 The Beat Poem as Performance

The witness says the break from tradition gathered momentum in the nineteen fifty-seven obscenity trial, when critics defended the poem's redeeming literary merit and its triumph propelled the Beats to fame. Their style was improvisatory and spontaneous, like jazz: first thought, best thought. These poems were written to be heard aloud.

A dive to a wreck, seeking identity.

AML 1630 Adrienne Rich and "Diving into the Wreck"

Auden chose Rich's first book for the Yale Younger Poets series for its delicacy and restraint. Her nineteen seventy-three collection *Diving into the Wreck* won the National Book Award, and the witness calls the metaphor her special genius: a woman's search for identity rendered as a dive to a wreck. The wreck is Western civilization itself.

Restraint abandoned for conviction.

AML 1631 Rich's Politics and Her Change of Style

The anchor says Rich's delicate, restrained poetry became radicalized across the nineteen sixties as she realized her personal situation was political. She wrote that she wanted to choose words that even you would have to be changed by, and criticized war, sexism and environmental destruction. The early Rich sounds nothing like the later.

Meter abandoned for the marginalized.

AML 1632 James Wright and the Turn to Loose Form

Wright grew up poor in Martins Ferry, Ohio, went to Kenyon on the GI Bill under John Crowe Ransom, and studied with Roethke at Washington. The anchor says his poetry moved from meter and stanza to loose form, and that his books centre on people society has pushed aside. The form changed along with the subject.

Six entries: a letter written inside a jail, and the beginning of the postwar stage in one family's trauma.

A boycott, a march, a Nobel.

AML 1633 Martin Luther King Jr. as a Prose Stylist

King led the Civil Rights Movement from nineteen fifty-five until his assassination in nineteen sixty-eight, beginning with a three-hundred-and-eighty-two-day boycott of Montgomery's bus lines. He spoke at the March on Washington, and the anchor connects that speech to his Nobel Prize in nineteen sixty-four. He is read on this exam as a writer.

A letter written inside the jail.

AML 1634 "Letter From Birmingham Jail"

The anchor records that King joined a large protest in Birmingham for fair hiring and the desegregation of department stores, that police brutality was used against the protesters, and that he was arrested. He wrote the letter during that ordeal, addressed to critics of the campaign. The occasion is one specific arrest.

Family first, then absurdity.

AML 1635 American Drama After the War

The witness groups the nineteen forties dramatists, Miller, Hellman and Williams, with the short story writers Porter and Welty, all of them exploring the fate of the individual within a family or a community. Later playwrights took up European existentialism and the theatre of the absurd. The realist decade comes before the absurdist one.

A sister's fate, written into plays.

AML 1636 Tennessee Williams and *The Glass Menagerie*

Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi, he took the pen name Tennessee. His sister Rose was given a lobotomy and spent her life institutionalized, and the witness says many of his plays deal with her trauma. *The Glass Menagerie* opened in Chicago and ran long on Broadway. The family material is direct rather than disguised.

Directions that ask for a mood.

AML 1637 *A Streetcar Named Desire*

Williams followed his first success with *A Streetcar Named Desire* in nineteen forty-seven, and the witness calls it one of his most enduring plays. His style is named poetic realism or poetic expressionism, and his stage directions call for a mood rather than a physical setting. Music and lighting work as symbols in his plays.

Three faces, and the mask between.

AML 1638 Blanche DuBois and the Masks She Wears

The witness calls Blanche a complicated character who at times performs the Southern belle, slightly down on her luck but steeped in gentility. At other times the mask slips to the sexually hungry woman, and at others to raw vulnerability, terrified of being played out and alone. Williams's characters are misfits and outsiders.

Six entries to close: a salesman given a tragedy's shape, a seventeenth-century trial staged against the fifties, and three playwrights after.

The American dream, examined ironically.

AML 1639 Arthur Miller and *Death of a Salesman*

The witness says Miller is known for ironic commentaries on the American dream, and that his plays capture the disillusionment and ambivalence of individual Americans. *Death of a Salesman*, of nineteen forty-nine, reached what another witness calls his personal pinnacle. Miller, O'Neill and Williams are grouped together by the sources.

A common man, in tragedy's shape.

AML 1640 Willy Loman and the Tragedy of the Common Man

Willy Loman is a marginally successful travelling salesman of women's undergarments who lives inside his own fantasies, including his dreams for his sons Biff and Happy. The witness calls the play a Greek tragedy for the twentieth century and Willy an everyman whose work produces nothing. His wife Linda says attention must be paid.

A Salem trial, staged in fifty-three.

AML 1641 *The Crucible* and Its Occasion

*The Crucible* of nineteen fifty-three depicts the Salem witchcraft trials, in which Puritan settlers were wrongfully executed. The witness states its message, that witch hunts directed at innocent people are anathema in a democracy, was relevant to the anti-communist crusade of the early nineteen fifties. Miller was later charged with contempt of Congress.

A family moves; a committee arrives.

AML 1642 Lorraine Hansberry and *A Raisin in the Sun*

The witness describes Hansberry's play of nineteen fifty-nine as revealing racism as a continuing undercurrent, in which a Black family meets a threatening welcome committee when it tries to move into a white neighbourhood. She was twenty-nine when the play opened, and died at thirty-four. The threat is delivered as a welcome.

An exposed fantasy, a Pittsburgh theatre.

AML 1643 Edward Albee and August Wilson

The witness calls Albee the most influential dramatist of the early nineteen sixties, whose *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* violently exposes a couple's shared fantasy of a child as untruth. August Wilson, self-taught in Pittsburgh, co-founded a Black Nationalist theatre company in nineteen sixty-eight. Albee brought European absurdism into American drama.

A voice the public words had lost.

AML 1644 Voice, Witness, and the Stage After 1945

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, and the decisive break came from the middle. Robert Lowell, a 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, which the witness calls a watershed. His students Plath and 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. 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 because the form restrains what would spill. On the experimental end, Ginsberg's poem was seized by Customs, defended in court for its literary merit, and carried the Beats to fame. Black poets built their own institutions: Brooks took the first Pulitzer awarded an African American and later published with Broadside Press, which printed Knight's poems from a prison cell, while Hayden refused the label and paid for it. On the stage the same search ran through family: Williams asked his directions for mood rather than furniture and gave Blanche three masks, Miller gave a salesman the shape of a Greek tragedy and used Salem to say what the fifties would not let him say directly, Hansberry put a welcome committee at a Black family's front door, and Albee exposed a marriage's shared fiction.

That closes the postwar poetry and the stage. The next unit is the writing of the last fifty years. You can describe Clifton's poems under twenty lines with no capitals and no punctuation, and Ginsberg reading to a shocked San Francisco audience, having his book seized by Customs and winning in court on literary merit, which carried the Beats to fame on a jazz aesthetic. You can account for Rich, chosen by Auden for her delicacy and radicalized across a decade once she realized her personal situation was political, and for James Wright abandoning meter for the people society had pushed aside. You can read King as a writer and place a letter composed inside a Birmingham cell during one specific arrest. You can describe Williams asking his stage directions for a mood rather than a set, and Blanche performing a belle, then a hungry woman, then raw vulnerability. And you can account for a salesman given a Greek tragedy's shape, a Salem trial staged against the fifties, a welcome committee at a new front door, and a marriage's shared fiction exposed.