Death of a Salesman Critical insights

Critical Insights: Arthur Miller
"It 's All About the Language"
Arthur Miller 's Poetic Dialogue

By Stephen A. Marino

In a 2003 interview with his biographer, Christopher Bigsby, about the inherent structure of his plays, Arthur Miller explained, "It 's all about the language" (Bigsby, "Miller"). Miller 's declaration about the centrality of language in the creation of drama came at the end of his almost seventy-year career. He had completed his final play, Finishing the Picture, and a little more than a year later, he became ill and subsequently died in February 2005. Thus Miller 's statement can be seen as a final avowal about how language operates in dramatic dialogue, a concern that had obsessed him since the start of his career when he wrote his first play, No Villain, at the University of Michigan in 1935.

Despite Miller 's proclamation, not enough critical attention has been paid to the sophisticated use of language that pervades his dialogue. Throughout his career, Miller often was subject to reviews in which critics mostly excoriated him for what they judged as a failed use of language in his plays. For example, in the Nation review of the original production of Death of a Salesman in 1949, Joseph Wood Krutch criticized the play for "its failure to go beyond literal meaning and its undistinguished dialogue. Unlike Tennessee Williams, Miller does not have a unique sensibility, new insight, fresh imagination or a gift for language" (283-84). In 1964, Richard Gilman judged that After the Fall lacks structural focus and contains vague rhetoric. He concluded that Miller 's "verbal inadequacy [has] never been more flagrantly exhibited" (6). John Simon 's New York review of the 1994 Broadway production of Broken Glass opined that "Miller 's ultimate failure is his language: Tone-deafness in a playwright is only a shade less bad than in a composer." In a June 2009 review of Christopher Bigsby 's authorized biography of Miller, Terry Teachout judged

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