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.

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. (“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. Goodnight Lou. Goodnight May. 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.”

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. 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. Philip Seymour Hoffman is magnificent as Willy Loman, the unspooling protagonist who, after decades of hard work, realizes (and is destroyed by the realization) that he has built his life on sand; how much strain and disappointment, how much stooped, shuffling anguish Hoffman is able to communicate simply by walking from one side of the stage to the other! Linda Emond, who plays Willy’s fretful wife, Linda, along with Andrew Garfield (their wayward, chronically underachieving elder son, Biff) and Finn Wittrock (Biff’s younger, better-adjusted brother, Happy), all do the work for which Miller intended them, enhancing and complicating the spectacle of a patriarch’s demise.

What I found so disappointing wasn’t the new production, however: it was the play itself. Like many people, I first encountered “Salesman” as a teen-ager, and—as with Steinbeck or Harper Lee—it was encouraging to discover that a supposed masterpiece of American literature could be so direct, comprehensible, and unmissably poignant. Miller’s ironies—as when Willy, on the night he is to commit suicide, goes out into his back garden and plants a packet of seeds—are never so subtle that the reader is in any danger of missing them. “Literature,” I remember thinking, “I could get the hang of this.”

Ten years later, at the Ethel Barrymore, I found myself squirming in my seat from boredom and exasperation, amazed at how much glaringly conventional stagecraft “Salesman” was able to pack into its two acts. The rising action, the dramatic irony, the laborious, grandstanding speeches (“Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing…When you’re rotting somewhere beside the railroad tracks, remember, and don’t you dare blame it on me”)—I kept wanting to exclaim, “It sounds like a play!”

Was I the only one? Perhaps. Everyone else in America seems to have been ravished by the play. Once again: the poignancy of Willy’s situation (to arrive at the belief that, after years of punishing effort, you are worth more to your family dead than alive) is not in question—it is the ten-decibel amplification that Miller uses to deliver it. At one moment, agonized by what he believes to be Biff’s lack of respect for him, Willy fantasizes about the crowds that would turn out at his funeral, were he to kill himself. The contortions of his battered self-esteem are painful to witness: “That funeral will be massive!” he exclaims. “They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the oldtimers with the strange license plates—that boy will be thunderstruck… because he never realized—I am known!”

A word to the wise is sufficient. That Willy’s funeral would not in fact be the standing-room-only affair he fondly conjures up is instantly clear to any audience: this is what moves us. But Miller is not content to let the suggestion percolate. He ends the play with a cloyingly lugubrious funeral, which is indeed sparsely attended. “But where are all the people he knew?” asks Linda. (Biff adds, in case we were in any doubt on this point, “He never knew who he was.”) What was finely implicit earlier on now feels about as subtle as a hand grenade in a barrel of oatmeal.

Henry James said that in art, economy is always beauty. Miller spends recklessly. Some of the greatest excesses come in the celebrated flashback scenes, which aim to take us inside Willy’s mind as he recalls a time when Biff and Happy were still promising high-school students, his own career seemed to be going well, and life for the Loman family was generally quite nice. More often than not, these flashbacks merely show us again what is already overexplicit in the present-day action of the play. In the second act, Biff is trying to explain to his father that he has just had a humiliating encounter with Bill Oliver, a successful businessman, whom he planned on asking for a loan with which to start his own business. Oliver, for whom he worked briefly many years ago, didn’t even remember Biff, and refused to see him. As Biff and his brother quarrel with Willy on one side of the stage, on the other, we see a moment from twenty or so years in the past (on which Willy keeps harping), when Biff’s classmate and neighbor, Bernard, came to break the news to Mrs. Loman that her son has failed high-school math:

YOUNG BERNARD (frantically): Mrs. Loman, Mrs. Loman!

HAPPY: Tell him what happened!

BIFF (to Happy): Shut up and leave me alone!

WILLY: No, no! You had to go and flunk math!

BIFF: What math? What’re you talking about?

YOUNG BERNARD: Mrs. Loman, Mrs. Loman!

(Linda appears in the house, as of old.)

WILLY (wildly): Math, math, math!

BIFF: Take it easy, Pop!

YOUNG BERNARD: Mrs. Loman!

WILLY (furiously): If you hadn’t flunked you’d’ve been set by now!

BIFF: Now, look, I’m gonna tell you what happened, and you’re going to listen to me.

YOUNG BERNARD: Mrs. Loman!

BIFF: I waited six hours…

HAPPY: What the hell are you saying?

BIFF: I kept sending in my name but he wouldn’t see me. So finally he… (He continues unheard as light fades low on the restaurant.)

YOUNG BERNARD: Biff flunked math!

LINDA: No!

YOUNG BERNARD: Birnbaum flunked him! They won’t graduate him!

LINDA: But they have to. He’s gotta go to the university. Where is he? Biff! Biff!

YOUNG BERNARD: No, he left. He went to Grand Central.

LINDA: Grand—You mean he went to Boston!

YOUNG BERNARD: Is Uncle Willy in Boston?

LINDA: Oh, maybe Willy can talk to the teacher. Oh, the poor, poor boy!