Williams Say about the Role of the Poet in The Glass Menagerie

In The Glass Menagerie the role of the poet is very important because the narrator of the play is Tom who is a poet by nature. Tom is the breadwinner for the family. He is employed at a shoe factory in order to support his family. He sneaks away to write

poetry when business is slow. He dreams of getting away from home where he is trapped in a job he hates. He believes he should experience life directly to write well. The function of the poet is to report truth; and the only way to arrive at truth is through experience. He feels that his environment is destroying his creative abilities. He sees his mother Amanda as a threat to his poetry because she has returns the D. H. Lawrence novel he was reading to the library. She thinks the novels of Lawrence to be highly immoral. So, she refuses to have .such a hideous book in her house. Besides, according to Tom, a man is by instinct a lover,“ a hunter and a fighter. But his mother tells him that instinct belongs to the animals. Tom is the poet and feels that man should live by his feelings and by his instinct. He feels that he is being destroyed as an individual by being forced to live all cramped up in the apartment and in the city. He seeks love, adventure, and romance. He resents both Amanda and Laura because they keep him at the dull job at the shoe factory when he should be travelling and Writing. However, he realizes later that a poet cannot escape his responsibilities towards his family.

Man is by instinct a. lover, a hunter, a lighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!