Mizzou Must-Reads: Plays &
Poetry

Winner of the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. This exciting drama about the Puritan purge of witchcraft in old Salem is both a gripping historical play and a timely parable of our contemporary society. A powerful drama. --NY Times.

"For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine."
Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34 years. At 60, he is cast aside, his usefulness exhausted. With no future to dream about he must face the crushing disappointments of his past. He takes one final brave action, but is he heroic at last or a self-deluding fool?

Troy Maxson is a hard man, having gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s - a spirit that is changing the world - a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.

The Glass Menagerie marked a crucial turning point in American theater, and forever changed the life of its then unknown author. Williams’s elegiac master- piece brought a radical new lyricism to Broadway — the tragedy, fragility, and tenderness of this “memory play” have made it one of America’s most powerful, timeless, and compelling plays.

Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, learns of the death of his father at the hands of his uncle, Claudius. Claudius murders his own brother to take the throne of Denmark and to marry Hamlet's widowed mother. Hamlet is sunk into a state of great despair as a result of discovering the murder of his father and the infidelity of his mother, and is torn between his great sadness and his desire for the revenge of his father's murder.

In this South African play a young man raised by 2 loving black servants cannot escape feelings of prejudice.

The legends surrounding the royal house of Thebes inspired Sophocles to create a powerful trilogy of mankind's struggle aginst fate. King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone tell of a man who brings pestilence to Thebes for crimes he doesn't realise he has committed, and then inflicts a brutal punishment on himself, and the fall of the next generation.

The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone, or something, named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning.

The elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath.

With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. These tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life--from knight to nun, miller to monk--reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth century that is as robust as it is representative.

Poetry that precisely conjures images of the war in Vietnam by an award-winning author.

Dante's extraordinary vision of Hell, with all its terror, pathos, and sardonic humor, and its penetrating analyses of the psychology of sin and the ills that plague society.

Finalist, 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. "Lucille Clifton is one of the four or five most authentic and profound living American poets."--Denise Levertov

Dating to the ninth century BC, Homer's timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War.

Whitman's writing is distinguished by an explosively innovative free verse style and previously unmentionable subject matter. Exalting nature, celebrating the human body, and praising the senses and sexual love, the monumental work was condemned as "immoral." Whitman continued evolving "Leaves of Grass" despite controversy.

Metamorphoses is a narrative of world history from creation to Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework. Completed in AD 8, it is recognized as a masterpiece of Golden Age Latin literature and the most-read classical work during the Middle Ages. Comprised of over fifty stories, it chronicles the legends of King Midas, Daedalus, Icarus, Hercules, and the Trojan War, making this the definitive work of classical mythology.

Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other--"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" -The New Yorker

Bishop's poems combine humor and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscape-from New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida, where she later lived-human connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos.

The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves and musicians; of the poor and the lovesick. They conveyed experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career.

These poems form a story of a married black couple from the early part of the century, a period that spans the great migration of blacks from rural south to urban north. Two separate sequences offer two views of the couple's lives: "Mandolin," consists of 23 poems giving Thomas's side, and "Canary in Bloom" gives Beulah's in 21 poems. Together they paint a detailed portrait of two lives in all their frailty, dignity and complexity. The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987.