In simple words succeeds,

For still the craft of genius is

To mask a king in weeds.

The major role of poetry, however, according to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others of their time, was to stand in opposition to science. "Poetry," Coleridge wrote, "is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter." Leigh Hunt (1784—1859), an influential figure of the Romantic period, declared, "Poetry begins where matter of fact or science ceases. ..." Cesaire in our own time says that science "is a lion without antelope and without zebras ... It is gnawed by hunger, the hunger of feeling, the hunger of life." And Omar Salinas in "Quetzacoa-tle" takes the impersonal "Big Bang" scientific theory of the origin of the universe and turns it into an exciting, vivid image:

You lunged and caught fire

flowers falling from a disenchanted

sky

The Korean poet So Chongju (1915—) also joins the opposition against science with this statement: "What must cause the poet to worry is not the anxiety drawn out of that which cannot be completed, but the anxiety and longing instilled by that which is completed too readily." Science fixes rules, insists on the veracity of its computations beyond which the poet must always travel.

The question of what poetry is or does remains open, and perhaps that is the wisest way to perceive poetry: as not being static. While we presume that poetry and prose differ, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) and Ezra Pound agree that it would be a "fruitless and futile mania" to probe for those differences.

Nevertheless, commonly accepted as differences between poetry and prose is that poetry may be written in meter, thus creating rhythm, and prose is not; that poetry may use rhyme (though it is not required to), while prose does not. Poetry distills, compresses, and refines knowledge from bulk to universal essences through rigorous and selective use of language. Prose, in contrast, is not necessarily concerned with those processes. Prose has long been considered "ordinary" language, even though the best prose may contain quite extraordinary language. It is worth noting that a number of poets also write prose fiction, like Alice Walker, Shirley Lim, Alexander Pushkin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Erdrich, Raymond Carver, Rita Dove, Ishmael Reed, Margaret At-wood, Wole Soyinka, Sandra Cisneros, Al Young, and others. This suggests that the differences between the genres may be in the eye of the beholder.

The poet may be like Houdini, binding himself or herself in the chains of traditional poetic forms and then creating interaction between theme, tone, imagery, simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, rhythm, meter, sound, and structure. Then the poet is tossed into the sea of creativity. The poet is further expected to miraculously escape, that escape being a poetic rendering of universal truth, vision, or beauty. When all is said and done, poetry should surprise us as much as Houdini's escapes surprised and delighted his audiences.

Some poetry may appear to be difficult to read (and some of it really is). But, like other forms of literature, it should be placed in perspective We should know, for example, when the poem was written, because that helps to tell us what kind of tradition it has inherited. Maybe the title of a poem will supply the clues we need to understand its theme, like W. H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen," or Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Bean Eaters." We should not try to bring more to a poem than is really there; if we anticipate, we cannot be surprised or delighted. Above all, the reader should have confidence in his or her ability to both understand and enjoy poetry, whatever its form. The more traditional structures, such as the sonnet or the villanelle, were the result of convention or poetic challenge; poetry is always changing, but every poem challenges the reader to get inside it.

Nothing about a poem is as important as the way it makes us feel—usually, the way the poet wants us to feel—and this is a reminder that it is imagination or invention and not profound meaning that is the most important gift the poet can bring us, for the poet always and ultimately wants us to understand the poem. Gwendolyn Brooks says quite pointedly, "I don't want [my work] to misrepresent the way I look at life to my readers."

Like Houdini, who kept seeking new ways to escape new inventions for detention, poetry evolved from the confinement of rigid structures and sometimes content, to what we now call free verse. This kind of poetry was fired by a new kind of poet, epitomized by Walt Whitman, in a relatively new nation. This was a poetry freed from the old rules. It introduced cadence, a sometimes stuttering kind of rhythm, and relied heavily on imagery. Free verse imagined the ordinary to be universal.

The new forms that were to spark the imagination, however, were not by any means acceptable to all poets. In this collection, for example, a number of twentieth century poets are as comfortable with the sonnet as were the poets of sixteenth century England. Auden, who remained a disciple of traditional structures, wrote of such devices as rhyme, meter, and stanza, that they "are like servants. If the master poet is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly, happy household." Still, form changes to reflect contemporary sensibilities. Thus, we include among poets the legions of blues, folk, rock, and others who sing story-poems which, in the poetic tradition, are also reduced to shimmering, universal essences.

In the sections that follow, we examine the strategies employed by poets to frame their visions of human experience in verse. Brief essays introduce key elements of poetic technique: theme, diction, tone, imagery, symbolism, simile and metaphor, personification and apostrophe, meter, rhythm and sound, structure, and form. Within each chapter, the work of several poets appears, followed by questions for comprehension and writing. By carefully reading and discussing the selections in each chapter, we might come to agree with Gwendolyn Brooks' assessment that poetry is, in the final analysis, "life distilled."

William Shakespeare

LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no; it is an ever-fixed mark, 5

That looks on tempests and is never shaken:

It is me star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come; 10

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

QUESTIONS

1. What familiar part of the standard Christian marriage ceremony does Shakespeare's first sentence echo? Why does Shakespeare use "marriage" as a word at the outset of the poem?

2. A sonnet is based on certain poetic conventions. One key convention of a Shakespearean sonnet is the division of die fourteen lines of the poem into four groups: lines 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, and 13-14. Analyze the organization of die poem according to these divisions, showing the way that Shakespeare advances his theme from stage to stage.

3. What two comparisons does Shakespeare draw in lines 5—8? What is the connection between "mark" and "star"? Explain the meaning of the eighth line. How does Shakespeare establish the conflict between love and time in lines 9-12?

4. What is the meaning and the tone of the last two rhymed lines? State die general theme that emerges from the poem.

Andrew Marvell

TO HIS COY MISTRESS

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love's day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges' side 5

Should'st rubies find: I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the Flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews, 10

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow,

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze:

Two hundred to adore each breast: 15

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate. 20

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found, 25

Nor in thy marble vault shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long preserved virginity,

And your quaint honor turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust. 30

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires 35

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may;

And now, like am'rous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour,

Than languish in his slow-chapped power. 40

Let us roll all our strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one ball;

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Thorough the iron gates of life.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun 45

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

QUESTIONS

1. Marvell builds a cogent argument to persuade his love in this poem, employing in the first two stanzas what debaters call a straw man (that is, an idea that is easy to knock down). What idea does he advance and then demolish in the first stanza? What related idea does he present and then destroy in the second stanza? With these possible objections to his argument eliminated, what is led for the lady to accept in the third stanza?

2. Many critics state that "To His Coy Mistress" is in the carpe diem tradition, in which the poet states that we should "seize the day," or do things immediately rather than postpone them. Here, Marvell relates the carpe diem motif to the need to enjoy love while one is still young. Evaluate the importance of this concept to your understanding of the poem.

3. The imagery, or vivid description, is very effective in this poem. Examine each stanza and explain the types or patterns of description that you detect. How does the description contribute to Marvell's argument?

4. How skillful is Marvell's argument? Is the poet interested only in seducing a woman, or are deeper ideas involved? For example, why does he refer to time and death?

UNDERSTANDING FICTION

Alice Walker, whose short story "Roselily" appears in this anthology, recounts in an essay the process whereby she absorbed tales from her mother, who in turn had received these stories from earlier ancestors and "anonymous" black women. These stories "came from my mothers lips as naturally as breathing." Their creative spark reflects the vitality of a long oral tradition.

Fiction began as storytelling, perhaps at night around warming campfires or anywhere else that people gathered. In those times the stories were sung or told in verse. Fiction comes directly from ancient oral traditions found in numerous cultures of the world.

Sometimes there were storytelling or story-singing contests, as in the classical age of Greek letters, when poet-playwrights read their works, more in verse than not, to audiences gathered for the festivals of Dionysus, which ran from autumn through spring each year. These early stories usually were about figures or events familiar to particular groups, and such stories often became well known. Eventually, embellishments on the standard tales (as they were then called) were applauded and encouraged. New characters with new characteristics appeared; new conflicts requiring other than the usual solutions were portrayed.

However much adorned, the stories that have lived the longest may symbolize basic human concerns that have remained unchanged. The story of Prometheus is a good example. We know the Prometheus story well as it has come down from the Greeks. Prometheus, pitying human beings, steals fire from the gods and brings it to earth, thus enriching human life with warmth and light. The same basic story is told in many variations all over the world. However, the heroes who steal from the gods or from other powerful beings range from ordinary mortals like King Arthur of England (securing Excalibur) to Rama of India (pulling his bow) to crafty animals (lizards, birds, or insects). At their core, though, such stories are essentially Promethean. However, it is only in die story of Prometheus that the hero is punished by the more powerful beings. In the other stories these beings exact no retribution.

Clearly, a story can have as many variations as it has storytellers, and we all tend to be storytellers, given enough encouragement. Saying "Can you top this?" or telling a fish story is as old as humanity itself. Stories may be viewed as conduits through which are passed history, cultural values, knowledge, and entertainment. Fiction provides us, as Richard Wright acknowledged of his own experience, with "vague glimpses of life's possibilities."

The short story and the novel (which may be considered a longer, more complicated story) are the major forms of fiction used today. The novella, or short novel, is a transitional form between the short story and die novel. The three forms evolved from the earlier tale, fable, legend, and myth.

Fiction, whether short or long, suffers from (or just possibly is enriched by) a preponderance of definitions, many of which are imposed upon the works by persons other than the creators of them. There are times when it is important to let the writers themselves say what fiction is or is not and what it should do or should not do. Nevertheless, if reading a work of fiction makes us believe in its content and its characters, then the work should be considered successful; for fiction is intended first to find believers, and belief must precede any other reaction to the work. A work of fiction usually possesses character, plot, setting, point of view, theme, and, sometimes, symbols. The way language is used to establish each of these elements helps to create within us a reaction to the work.

The choice of language is only one of several ways to tell us what fiction is. Thomas Berger in his novel Killing Time (1972) states, "A work of fiction is a construction of language and otherwise a lie." Constructions of language shape civilization. (Lies are told for no other reason than to be believed.) Next, we confront E. L. Doctorow's assertion, "There is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction." A third perspective comes from Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer: "At best, art can be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while." Singer's lies, then, are "white," and his "constructions of language" are illusions.

Explanations of "fiction" abound. Flannery O'Connor holds that the written word has more meaning than the spoken, a fact that gives fiction more importance, perhaps more moral force, than speech. For Herman Melville, fiction offers more reality "than life itself can show.” And for Amy Tan, fiction is predicated on "the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth." In any event, it is clear that fiction is a statement by a writer about a real or imaginary world, past, present, or future; it is a response to the enormous pulsations of the universe by a writer who is part of it. How do we or should we respond to such a statement? Do we feel pleasure? Should fiction make us pause to reflect?

The question of what fiction does or should do, if anything, draws relatively clear opinions from fiction writers. "It has," says Singer, "the magical power of merging causality with

purpose, doubt with faith, the passions of the flesh with the yearnings of the soul.. . . The zeal for messages has made many writers forget that storytelling is the raison d'etre of artistic prose."

We think this means that good fiction, without having a discernible "message," can fulfill a deep moral need for the reader, just as a writer may feel a moral compulsion to create fiction. Flannery O'Connor seems to support this stance: "It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much else unless it is good in itself." This statement seems to imply that it is possible for fiction not to have any value other than that of being good fiction—possessing an intrinsic worth, with all other factors being extraneous.

Time and again writers stress the need, first of all, to tell a story, a good story. William Faulkner, also a Nobel laureate, said that "the primary job of any writer is to tell you a story, a story out of human experience—I mean by that, universal, mutual experience, the anguishes and troubles and griefs of the human heart, which is universal, without regard to race or time or condition. He wants to tell you something which has seemed to him so true, so moving, either comic or tragic, that it's worth repeating."

Fiction can be a shared experience—a sharing of statements, observations, and moods.

The writer invites you into his or her created, ordered world so you can view your life from a new perspective. As Nobel laureate Toni Morrison observes, fiction can alert readers to "unaccountable beauty . . . the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer's imagination . . . the world that the imagination evokes."

Former Esquire and Saturday Evening Post fiction editor Rust Hills believes that contemporary fiction "has much to tell us about how we live, presents a kind of complex truth about ourselves and our society that can be found neither in the analyses and statistics of the psychologists and sociologists nor in the recently popular 'new reportage' . . . when we try to understand any past civilization we turn first to Art." Fiction may provide us with knowledge where before there was ignorance.

Telling a good story is considered by many to be a primary function of fiction, but telling a truthful story seems to be equally important. According to Joseph Conrad, all art "may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing light to the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. . . ." Conrad's opinion raises a problem. Is the writer's truth more truthful than anyone else's? Or might his truth merge with that of the reader? Truth is joined, made "manifold and one," and that characteristic, along with others, makes for good fiction. Perhaps this is what Grace Paley means when she states that fiction writing bears with it certain moral responsibilities, saying, "Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life." We are once again faced with the fact that good fiction may awake in readers a sense of moral thought and action and that the action considered often is that of creating a story. Yet we must be careful about the "truth" of a writer's vision. For example, the African writer Chinua Achebe, whose story "Civil Peace" appears in this anthology, has taken issue with the "truth" of Conrad's "classic" Heart of Darkness, finding in it the "depersonalization of a portion of the human race."

Most people feel that there is a story or novel within them waiting for an opportunity to get out, and perhaps that is as it should be. Flannery O'Connor, a fine guide to the materials of fiction, declares, "The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made of dust. ..." No one has ever been able to say for sure where even the "humblest" materials come from, how they are gathered and fashioned into the shape of a story or novel. We simply do not know. Yet we do recognize, in one way or another, the ability of a good writer of fiction to take the most ordinary materials and render them into extraordinary works.

Edgar Allan Poe writes, "Either history affords [the writer] a thesis—or one is suggested by an incident of the day—or at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative—designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue or authorial command, whatever crevices of fact or action may, from page to page, render themselves apparent." Somewhere in the creative process, Poe is saying, is an experience the writer has had which he or she desires to share with others. This view is shared by Leo Tolstoy: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them. ..."

James Baldwin articulates a similar perspective: "One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give."

Often the writer tries to share uncommon experience in order to extend our knowledge. Certainly Ernest Hemingway was such a writer. Hemingway, indeed, implies that Dostoevsky's greatness was a result of extreme hardship: "Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia." It was also Hemingway's opinion, shared by a number of writers, including James Joyce and Richard Wright, that writers "are forged in injustice as a sword is forged."

The idea that fiction is based on personal experience, which then seeks universal acceptance, refers, of course, to only one method by which fiction is created. The most widely held opinion is mat fiction is created from a mixture of fact and fancy. We sense this admixture of fact and fancy in a writer like Jorge Luis Borges, who is so intrigued by the labryinth in his fiction that he terms this structure "a symbol of bewilderment, a symbol of being lost in life."

Although fiction comes in several forms, our basic concern in this text is with die short story, which was created and defined in die United States early in die nineteenth century. While the short prose narrative—the tale—goes back to die eighth century B.C., Edgar Allan Poe is said to have first recognized the genre of die short story in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales in 1842. The term "story," as opposed to "tale," is believed to have originated in die Henry James collection Daisy Miller: A Study; and Other Stories, which was published in 1883.

Of Hawthorne's short stories Poe wrote that the form belonged "to die loftiest region of art." As to the mechanics of creating die story, Poe added that "having conceived with deliberate care a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he [the writer] then invents such incidents—he combines such events as may best aid him in establishing his preconceived effects." Furthermore, "if his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, men he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which die tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the pre-established design."

Poe's rules influenced die rise both of die short story and of poetic forms in the United States and abroad. How do these rules stand up after 150 years? Isaac Bashevis Singer states: "Unlike the novel, which can absorb and even forgive lengthy discussions, flashbacks, and loose construction, the short story must aim directly at its climax. It must possess uninterrupted tension and suspense. Also, brevity is its very essence. The short story must have a definite plan. . . ." Both Poe and Singer eschew didactic elements in the short story, but it often happens that such elements find their way into a work even in the conceptual stage. Given many writers' concern for truth and justice, didactic sections may perhaps be excused. One definition of "didactic," it is worth noting, is "morally instructive."

Short story writers now are legion, and they have, like the form, contributed much to literature from the early stages of the industrial revolution to today's age of supertechnology. It is often said, and it is probably true, that most people in most modern societies find themselves with diminishing time to read. Novels are longer and demand more time and thought from us; short stories may demand more consideration for shorter periods of time and perhaps have not quite so much labyrinthian plot. The short story may be perfect for our age—and even perfect for certain writers. As Alice Munro admits, she started writing short stories because she didn't have time to write anything else!

As an integral part of literature, the short story, like the novel, must first of all tell us a story. The various interpretations of the story, the question of which philosophy it might propound, and whether the author succeeded—all such considerations come long after the facts of creation and publication. It may happen that as literature becomes more and more just another product of the entertainment factory, the labels attached to literature may come to bear more weight than the works themselves. We, of course, hope this will not happen.

By whatever means a story is created and however it is structured, whether it imitates life, expresses it, affects it, or projects it, language ultimately makes the story work. Language is the final mold of all the other elements of fiction—language shows what it is and what it does, reveals how it was created, and gives it the ultimate form it demands. A contemporary novelist and poet, Judith Ortiz Cofer, who grew up in the United States initially speaking Spanish, describes her acquisition of a second language—English—as an emergence from the bottom of a swimming pool: "I managed to surface and breathe the air of the real world ... for I needed to communicate almost as much as I needed to breathe." Language creates character, action, mood, tone, symbols, and so on. Concepts do not. Everything in the world, as a highly fluent chimpanzee in Bernard Malamud's novel God's Grace (1982) declares, might very well be the genesis of a story, but it takes language for the telling. In good fiction, in all great literature, it is language that we see, feel, and hear. Language is both the wrapper on the package and one of the gifts inside it.

UNDERSTANDING DRAMA

“All the world's a stage," wrote Shakespeare in one of the most famous lines in drama, "and all the men and women merely players." Indeed our human drama is persistent and universal, probably as old as the earliest hunters who disguised themselves and tried to act like those animals they were trying to lure into a trap and kill. The hunt and other crucial activities became ongoing dramas reflecting human conflict and the struggle for survival; and these dramas lent themselves to the creation of stories about bravery and cowardice, endurance and extinction, tragedy and comedy.

From its beginnings, drama (which Aristotle called "imitated human action"), like other forms of literature, was meant to tell the story of humankind in conflict with its world. In the acting out of events, drama often invested the most ancient and sometimes the most ordinary rituals with pomp and mystery. Western drama, in fact; grew from religious rituals; comedy derived from the Dionysian rites celebrating fertility and growth, and tragedy from the goat songs (again embedded in Dionysian rituals) that stressed the sacrificial nature 6f existence and the reality of death. Drama in all ages is, as William Archer stated aptly in Play-making (1926), "a representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers of natural forces which limit and belittle us: it is one of us thrown living upon the stage there to struggle against fatality, against social law, against one of his fellow mortals, against himself if need be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the malevolence of those around him." There could be no drama without that universal picture, on stage, of human beings confronting physical, mental, and spiritual obstacles.

Drama differs from other forms of literature in that it demands a stage and performances. The drama critic Eric Bentley is correct when he declares that drama enjoys a double life—that it can be enjoyed by both spectator and reader. But the fact remains that most plays are written to be produced. Most critics stress this obvious but also subtle truth, that drama must be performed; in fact, performance is an element of drama. Professor J. M. Manly, for one, states that drama requires a story, told in action, by actors who impersonate the characters of the story. Similarly, Elder Olson speculates: "If we drink about the things a dramatist must do, as a minimum, to make a play, it becomes clear that he must (1) devise some sort of action, together with characters who can appropriately carry it out, (2) contrive a scenario which shows what actions are to be enacted on the stage in what order, and (3) compose the dialog, or at least indicate roughly what sort of thing shall be said by die actors." In both definitions of drama there is, as we shall see, the relentless ghost of Aristotle dominating the various elements. Yet what is most revealing about these definitions, and all other useful explanations of the nature of drama, is that they stress the theatrical perspective.

It is the theatrical perspective that forces us to focus on drama's need for producers and directors, playwright and actors, theater and stage, audience and, alas, critics. A play, after all, is human action or human experience dramatized for stage production, and this theatrical reality offers both possibilities and constraints. Playwrights have always been aware of the special environment of theater. George Bernard Shaw, writing for The New York Times in 1912, listed in several paragraphs the many factors that dictate the playwright's methods. Here is a typical paragraph:

I do not select my methods: they are imposed on me by a hundred considerations: by the physical considerations of theatrical representation, by the laws devised by the municipality to guard against fires and other accidents to which theatres are liable, by the economies of theatrical commerce, by the nature and limits of the art of acting, by the capacity of the spectators for understanding what they see and hear, and by the accidental circumstances of the particular production in hand.

Shakespeare knew about these theatrical constraints three hundred years before Shaw, just as Broadway playwrights and producers understand them more than half a century after Shaw. Theater depends on numerous art forms, and it is assuredly an expensive literary art.

The playwright, unlike the poet or fiction writer, creates for a mass audience, not for individuals. In classical times, the distinction between poet and dramatist was not so marked. In ancient Greece, playwrights were called poets, for drama was written in verse; and poets often competed in state-sponsored contests. Greek dramatic presentations (the word "drama" comes from die Greek word meaning "a thing done") were civic occasions; sometimes the performances lasted for days. Eventually, drama and poetry went their separate ways, although at times they would again merge significantly, as in works by Shakespeare, Ibsen (notably Brand and Peer Gynt), Brecht, and Archibald MacLeish. Drama can incorporate poetry while still being fiction in an imaginative sense; it shares with these major genres a telling about humankind and die world. Nevertheless, its elements ultimately contrast with those of poetry and fiction because those elements must be made visible. We go to the theater to see; that is its essence.

The question of exactly what we see has been a subject of critical debate ever since Aristotle formulated his ideas about drama, especially tragedy, in his Poetics. What we should see, to follow Aristotle's Poetics, is plot, the most important part of drama. The ancients liked to compare plot to the tying and untying of a knot. Plot should be organized, according to Aristotle, in such a way as to present the good or just hero or heroine who must suffer because of some inherent personal defect. Plot is the entire action and sequence of events in a play—all the movement arranged as an organic whole. As Aristotle explained, speaking specifically of tragedy:

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something, as some other thing follows it.

Through plot, a playwright "imitates" the cause-and-effect movement of existence, adjusting the rhythm to fit the mode of presentation, whether that mode is comedy or farce, tragedy or melodrama, tragicomedy or pantomime. Through plot, characters reach out to us in language and action, melody and spectacle (to invoke once again some key Aristotelian categories), in order to illuminate their confrontations with time and the world.

Ideally we must feel and vicariously live through these confrontations and the larger human experience of the play, if we are spectators, or bring an equal sensitivity to our solitary reading of the play. A playwright normally has only two to three hours to create this special magic of drama, to bring us into the theatrical universe. As the noted philosopher Susanne K. Langer states in Feeling and Form, drama confronts us with "the semblance of events lived and felt ... so that they constitute a purely and completely experienced reality, a piece of virtual life." Perhaps we invest the characters with ourselves, sharing their pity and fear, their joy and laughter, within the enchanted context of the play. However, when it is over, we feel pleasure because our emotions have been manipulated—as we wished them to be—and we are ourselves once again. Aristotle, again referring to tragedy, termed this emotional response catharsis, the purging of pity and fear in the very being of an audience.

Aristotle has had such a pervasive influence on the conventions of drama that playwrights and critics have been honoring, modifying, or attempting to abandon his rules ever since they were formulated in the Poetics. Of course, Aristotle based his formulations about the elements of drama (for instance, the structural elements of fable, character, and thought; and the stylistic elements of language, melody, and spectacle) and about the dramatic unities of time, place, and action upon the earlier Greek drama of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Two of these great Greek dramatists—Sophocles and Aristophanes—are represented in this anthology, including the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, which Aristotle considered the perfect example of tragedy. Aristotle, in other words, based his critical theories on living drama. In Oedipus Rex, the perfectly "Aristotelian" play, the characters come to destruction more from their own defects than from the wrath of the gods that Aeschylus used in an earlier time. Moreover, the plot embodied the rules of dramatic unity—that the action of the play be a unified whole, that the scene remain unchanged or be confined to a specific area, and that the action of the play be limited to 24 hours—that Aristotle esteemed.

Dramatists and critics have had to deal with Aristotle's ghost. Lost for a time, the Aristotelian concepts of drama's form and content surged back into Renaissance drama in the sixteenth century. Shakespeare, for one, modified Aristotle's conceptions of plot by creating double plots in many of his plays, notably in King Lear; while in Othello, presented in this text, there is a "violation" of the concept of unity of place. Historically, then, as drama has evolved, dramatists have questioned Aristotle's ghost. In 1663, Moliere declared that "the great rule of all rules is not to please." He was not comfortable with Aristotle's influence during the neoclassical period. One of his characters in School for Wives (1663) echoes the wish of Moliere to be free from old restraints: "When I see a play I look only whether the points strike me; and when I am well entertained, I do not ask whether I have been wrong, or whether the rules of Aristotle would forbid me to laugh." In the twentieth century, the great dramatist Bertolt Brecht would still be trying to expiate Aristotle's ghost. In his anti-Aristotelian essay, "Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction," Brecht insists that we must not only be amused by theater and be drawn into it, but also be detached, or alienated, from the theatrical event to such an extent that we can learn from the dramatic representation on stage and feel urged to act militantly because of this detached understanding of the human drama. We can never make too much of Aristotle, but eventually we do come back to the play itself; and a play, as Thornton Wilder observed in 1941, "visibly represents pure existing."

How playwrights recreate or reproduce "pure existing" is a matter that varies from dramatist to dramatist and age to age. Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries used plot conventions that did not exist in Aristotle's time; while Brecht, in a play like Mother Courage, works wonders with the sort of episodic plot that Aristotle despised. Again, historical progress results in revolutions in stage-setting techniques. Devices far more complicated than those used by the Greeks were common in Renaissance drama. The Renaissance produced the modern proscenium arch, instead of the usual two or three arches, and stage setting became an art in its own right. Some playwrights, seeking maximum popularity, devised plots to utilize the spectacular: fireworks, water fountains, trapdoors, flying machines, and the like.

A play—that visible representation of pure existing—derives from the artistry of the dramatist and the values of the age. For example, Shakespeare's tragedy Othello is usually discussed without reference to the question of racism, but in discussions of The Merchant of Venice the question of anti-Semitism often arises. Was Shakespeare interested in die issue of racism in Othello? Textual analysis of the play and the treatment on which Shakespeare based his tragedy indicate that racism is an issue, adding yet another dimension to this extraordinary drama. Margaret Webster, producer of the play starring Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen, wrote: "One fact stands in sharp relief. The difference in race between Othello and every other character in the play is, indeed, the heart of the matter. This is the cause of Othello's terrible vulnerability on which Iago fastens so pitilessly; because of this, the conduct of which Desdemona is accused seems to Othello only too horribly possible; this is Iago's first and most powerful weapon, twisted to every conceivable use. ..."

Major dramatists—Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Miller, Hansberry, Hwang— probe the values of their age in an effort to seek the individual's importance in the world. What William Rose Benet said of Ibsen, that he "brought the problems and ideas of his day onto die stage," is true of all significant playwrights looking for affirmations of life itself. Drama might very well have begun in imitation of life with only remembered or told events as guidelines, but today it is firmly wedded to the written word, or script. A script is composed of die dialogue and stage directions designed to set "pure existing" in motion, with the acts and scenes that structure this action—all of which, of course, are not to be found in a work of fiction or poetry as we know them today.

Fiction and poetry make us imagine, make us create paths that lead us into the writer's world. On stage, however, all is spoken or couched in movement. The sets and machinery visibly present us a place and a time that we do not have to imagine. The characters "play" before us: real, palpable, and, one hopes, as true to life or die spirit of life as the playwright wished them to be. Theme, symbol, tone, plot—indeed, all dramatic convention—unfold and evolve before us. The dramatic elements evolve from the written to the spoken word, defining and giving depth to die characters and action we see. The dramatist, like a demigod, literally speaks Creation into existence; and in this process the dramatist teaches the human heart, as Shelley suggested, the knowledge of itself.

Perhaps what some saw and others did not is the beginning and the essence of drama; those who had had singular experiences wished to share them, to tell a tale, to act out a story. In drama the entire process of telling stories has come full circle. The oral traditions mark our beginnings as literate peoples. Then came the signs, symbols, glyphs, and alphabets, followed by extended writing and printing. It is the combination of how well the playwright has perceived and written and how well the actor conveys the meanings of his or her words—the double utilization of language—that provides us with the most successful drama.

As you explore the rich diversity of drama in the following sections, you will find brief essays exploring theme, character, plot, and dramatic form, followed by major plays for discussion and evaluation. You will also see the interplay of many cultures that has shaped plays around the world, and be encouraged to identify those shared experiences that make for great universal drama.