The new production, directed by Mike Nichols, has been lavishly praised, and it would be miserly to suggest that none of this praise is warranted. I thought of this class recently, when I went to see Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” currently in revival at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, in New York.

Goodnight,” or “She approached me / About buying her desk,” or “Books are a load of crap.” In other words, the best poems are often those that prompt the response: “ That doesn’t sound like poetry.” (“When was the last time anyone here saw a bower?” he asked flatly.) The best poetry, our teacher was trying to get us to realize, was that which smuggled into verse things that you would never expect to find there-like the lines, “Goodnight Bill.

What our teacher was complaining about, it now seems obvious, was the tendency of students to cloak our rather banal thoughts and impressions in a poetical gauze-our tendency, after reading Keats, say, to fill our poems with bowers and nightingales and long, slow vowels. I once had a creative-writing teacher who would tactfully condemn a line of student verse by saying, in the long-suffering yet indulgent tone with which a wife might scold her husband for once again forgetting to put the cat out, “It sounds like poetry.” Sometimes, to mix things up-there was much to criticize in our work-he would put it another way: “This sounds like the kind of thing you might find in a poem.” Why this should have been such a defect was not entirely clear to us at the time.

Death of a salesman book