|
Contents » Cover |
||
|
Essays
Not many people know that Tennessee Williams was a brilliant poet. New Directions, who published two volumes of his poems while he was alive, has now brought out this definitive edition of published and unpublished poems, and poems from plays. I remember the first time I saw "The Night of the Iguana" how entranced I was by the poem "How Calmly Does the Orange Branch." Of course, Williams's lyrical and poetic voice helped his plays sing, and his characters to reach corners of his audiences' minds and hearts that other playwrights were not able to reach. The painful longing and sense of loss that inhabit Williams's plays and stories are no less present in the poems. His ability to connect with the soul's troubled inner-workings and to describe desire's crippling ecstasy makes these poems authentically warm. Clearly his stature as a playwright kept his achievement as a poet hidden. The New Critics who ruled poetry criticism at the time gave them little praise. Indeed, their quality is mixed, yet their vigor is constant. To have them now allows us time to measure the fullest impact of his talent, skill, and sympathy as an artist: "I sing of the prodigal race, / the earlier dying, / the witchlike girls on the brooms / of morning flying, // The boys with the startled eyes / and covert hunger, / I sing of these, of their brief / and luckless number." ("One Hand in Space")
|
|||||
