Language

Abstract

A common adverse criticism is that the play’s language, which is deficient as poetry, makes it fall short of great drama. Labelling his review ‘Poetry without Words’, T. C. Worsley declared that nonverbal qualities do not constitute ‘an adequate substitute for the words which just aren’t there’ (New Statesman and Nation, 6 Aug. 1949). Eric Bentley called its poetic passages ‘bad poetry, the kind that sounds big and sad and soul-searching when heard for the first time and spoken very quickly within a situation that has already generated a good deal of emotion’ but which is actually ‘ham. Mere rhetorical phrasing’ (in Hurrell). Joseph Wood Krutch said its language was ‘as unmemorable, and as unquotable’ as it was unpoetic (Nation, 5 March 1949), but such phrases as ‘He’s liked, but he’s not — well liked’, ‘attention must be paid’, and ‘riding on a smile and a shoestring’ have passed into the language, even finding their way into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Nowadays, critics usually applaud Miller’s achievement. As Robert Cushman states (Observer, 23 Sept. 1979): The language of the play has been grievously underrated. Line after line flashes out. If Willy’s dream of his funeral — ‘all the old-timers with the strange license plates’ — obviously strains for poetry, it just as obviously achieves it. And even the supposed clinkers have their validity. Why shouldn’t Linda tell us ‘attention must be paid to such a person’? Greek choruses make equally explicit appeals to our concern.