SOURCE: Jackson, Esther M. “Maxwell Anderson: Poetry and Morality in the American Drama.” Educational Theatre Journal 25, no. 1 (March 1973): 15-33.

In the following essay, Jackson discusses Anderson's role in the creation of an indigenous language for American drama.

Poetry is … a way of using language … that impels the user … toward whatever vision he may be able to formulate of human destiny.¹

I

One of the most widely discussed of the problems thought by many critics to have limited the maturation of American drama is that described as “language.” Critics such as Robert Brustein have suggested that the multiplex realities unfolding in the works of major American dramatists have not been translated effectively into an appropriate stage language. In his influential essay The Theatre of Revolt, Brustein has commented that even so powerful a dramatic vision as that which appears in the works of Eugene O'Neill is dimmed by an...