As The Poems Go

as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.

(Charles Bukowski)

clouded?

oops i forgot- i was checking the cie site (again) and the poems listed there completely contradict the printed syllabus we all got at the beginning of the year.

this link includes "pike" and excludes both the Rosetti poems, whereas the hard copy is the exact mirror opposite:

http://www.cie.org.uk/CIE/WebSite/UCLESData/Documents/A%20Level/Other%20Docs/Notes%20on%20AS%20Anthology%20april%2014.pdf


(should we just cover all of them?)

the last one?

Q. Does Arthur Miller fail in his indictment of American political policy to intervene in the lives of citizens regarding their choices? Base your answer on Eddie’s betrayal of Rodolpho considering Eddie a representative of the law.

“A View from the Bridge” revolves around an Italian family settled in Brooklyn in a fragment of the 20th century when McCarthyism was on the rise. The play focuses upon the turbulence caused by the entry of two illegal immigrants into the home of Eddie Carbone. His wife’s Italian cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, shatter the ostensibly comfortable atmosphere which previously existed in the family, shedding light upon the relationship between Eddie and his wife, as well as the somewhat suspicious relationship between him and his niece, Catherine. One could say Miller utterly fails in his attempt to indict American policy due to the fact that the audience invariably sympathizes with Eddie until his death. The pathos of the play must be examined as well as different levels of symbolism.
In the opening scene of the play, we find Eddie narrating an anecdote to Catherine of a neighbour, Vinny, Bolzano, who reported his own illegally residing uncle to authorities and was thrown out of his home for his betrayal. The intolerance of this kind of act is palpably conveyed by Eddie’s tone and here we may be exposed to Miller’s strong stand against McCarthyism. Simultaneously it is slightly foreshadowed that Eddie will eventually face the same fate that he speaks of despicably, as an earlier narrator mentions the protagonist’s doom. This upfront transparency of the storyline may be seen as ineffective, but it does provoke a new stream of thought: What could cause Eddie to become what he is so obviously against? What is it that could justify American policy to intervene in the lives of citizens? Can McCarthyism be perceived as something legitimate? If anything, this flow of questions serves as a Pandora’s Box for Miller if he does want to indict America’s policy.
As the play progresses and escalates, we are introduced to Marco and Rodolpho and their homely charm. Rodolpho’s plain attraction to Catherine is deliberately evident in their first meeting itself, and Eddie’s fatherly instinct towards her suddenly manifests itself as dangerously close to that of a lover as he warns her in an almost jealous manner. We continue to sympathize with Eddie as his hatred of the immigrants grows and understand the toil he has endured in the harbour for a seeming eternity. Do these feelings help justify McCarthyism in a strange sense? If symbolism is taken into account at this stage and the play is no longer perceived simplistically as the dispute within a family, that sympathy is somewhat lost. Eddie’s betrayal of Marco and Rodolpho stems from nothing but personal anger, caused by his sexual attraction towards his niece. Can these motives translate to anything on another level? Senator Joseph McCarthy, a conservative politician from Wisconsin, may have felt it an absolute necessity to cleanse his nation of communists and the ideology in its entirety before it could taint America, a country which he, in a sense, like all true Americans, helped to foster and grow. It can be construed that Catherine represents America as a nation in “A View from a Bridge”, and Eddie does not want her to be usurped by someone or something foreign, just as McCarthy had a paranoia about the communist takeover of America during the Cold War, a constant oscillation of aggression and containment. Is it not only natural that as a protective gesture, one should report anything unfamiliar or illegal? One could say, as reflectd in our recurrent sympathy for Eddie, Miller almost justifies McCarthyism, not in the least indicting it.
As the climax nears, Eddie, in an act of complete desperation, blindly stumbles to the artistically emphasized telephone booth. The brightly coloured telephone is depicted as a temptation, or something that is wrong and should be resisted, which in reversal of the law, as technically reporting an illegal immigrant is something “right” and not using the telephone would be the wrong act. In this light, American law and political policy is once again seen as something indicted by the playwright. Thus we are very aware of the fact that McCarthyism is something conventionally accepted as wrong today, yet we understand the undercurrent of the sentiments during the Cold War's tensions, somewhat synonymous to the tensions overwhelming Eddie Carbone’s household, eventually engulfing him.

another McCarthyism essay

Does Arthur Miller fail in his indictment of American political policy to intervene in the lives of citizens regarding their choices? Base your answer on Eddie’s betrayal of Rodolpho, considering Eddie as a representative of the law.


Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, first performed in 1955, is the conclusion of a trilogy of plays (the others are Death of a Salesman and The Crucible) in which Miller expresses his feelings on the complex American political and social scene in the turbulent early Cold War period. In A View from the Bridge Miller uses his protagonist, the illiterate longshoreman Eddie Carbone, as a symbol of the culture of reporting one’s friends and close acquaintances (in this case, family) to the law: a particularly chilling facet of life in an America dominated by the antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican who exploited the fear created by the conviction of Alger Hiss (a senior State Department official exposed as a spy for the USSR) to lead an unscientific and frequently unlawful anticommunist witch-hunt.

The play operates on two principal levels: a drama about sexuality and sexual jealousy; and a political drama about the evils of McCarthyism. It is true that some knowledge of McCarthyism is required for the reader to appreciate this level; I do not regard this as a failure on Miller’s part, as he was obviously aiming at the theatregoing public of his time who were well-acquainted with political cultural works such as Miller’s other plays, Elia Kazan’s film On the Waterfront, and a few years later, Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove. Eddie Carbone is at the forefront of both storylines. It is interesting to compare the plots of the three versions of the play: in the original, poorly received American version, a one-act play, the sexual drama is emphasized and Eddie dies at Catherine’s feet; in the London version, the two-act text that Miller chose to preserve, the sexual drama is played down and he dies in Beatrice’s arms; and finally, in the Paris stage version that some critics regarded as the finest, Eddie commits suicide. In my view the final scenario presents the most convincing critique of McCarthyism, as Eddie himself is shown to be repulsed by his own deeds. Yet it is the official, London stage version that is in question here, and it is in this version that the play must be explored.

Miller’s representation of the evils of McCarthyism is Eddie’s betrayal of his wife’s cousins Marco and Rodolpho, illegal immigrants from Sicily. Just as many Americans reported their acquaintances as communists, Eddie reports his two kinsmen to the Immigration Bureau: largely due to his sexual jealousy, as his niece Catherine (who he is attracted to) is in love with and betrothed to his wife’s cousin Rodolpho. Eddie is killed by Marco, and this act is shown by Miller to be an act of righteous vengeance. Eddie is simple-minded, irrational and eventually unethical in his actions: in Miller’s view, the typical qualities exhibited by those Americans who told on their friends.

Miller’s allegory is neither an unqualified success nor a total failure. Throughout the play, the culture of reporting is clearly seen as contemptible and indeed evil. The early illustrative example of Vinny Bolsano, a man exiled by society for reporting his relatives to the Bureau, is the first sign of this. Bolsano is portrayed as someone who deserved his bitter fate: importantly, Eddie too shares in the contempt for Bolsano’s actions. To Miller’s 1955 audience, it would have been clear enough that the culture of reporting to the Immigration Bureau represented the culture of reporting to the Tydings Committee (a Senate committee greatly influenced by McCarthy) and the House Un-American Activities Committee (a committee that McCarthy was not directly linked to but that was certainly McCarthyist in outlook).

Eddie’s character and actions are reprehensible in several ways, at least in theory. He betrays two members of his wife’s family who are apparently righteous men who have, objectively, done Eddie no personal harm. His incestuous feelings for Catherine lead him to become violent, unpredictable and unstable. The incest is thrown in the attempt to make Eddie an even more flawed character, but Miller fails here on a fairly obvious point: although Eddie and Catherine have a father/daughter relationship that make his feelings incestuous even though they are not related by blood, Rodolpho and Catherine too are fairly close relations, and blood relations at that: a fact that Miller chooses to ignore. Yet objectively speaking it is obvious that Eddie has committed foolish and heinous crimes.

Miller’s failure is that his depiction of Eddie does not allow the audience to despise him and his deeds fully. For Eddie is, throughout the play, doing what he sees is right; his betrayal may on its own be an evil action, it is not the action of an irredeemably evil human being. And his feelings for Catherine are most certainly feelings he did not want; indeed they are an attraction that he fights against, albeit unsuccessfully. It is also easy to see why he dislikes Rodolpho; Rodolpho represents everything except what Eddie values in a man. Miller fails to make the audience side decisively against Eddie.

My final criticism is that the choice of allegory itself is rather ineffective. Whereas the analogy of the Salem Witch Trials, used by Miller in The Crucible, were a highly relevant example of irrational persecution that fit well with McCarthyism, the issue of immigration is a very different matter. Persecuting citizens regarding their ideological views is not comparable to the entirely justifiable policy of securing one’s borders and formalizing immigration that is practised by every country on Earth. To consider Eddie’s betrayal as truly representative of the diabolical culture of McCarthyism is to regard the movement of people as something that should be completely free and unregulated: a notion manifest in its idiocy and indeed lunacy.

Miller strives to bring out the theme of McCarthyism in the play. He succeeds up to a point, in that the play’s protagonist unfairly reports his relatives in much the same way as many Americans reported theirs in the 1950s. But in the end, it is almost natural for the audience to sympathize with and even side with Eddie. It shouldn’t be.