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Unit 26: Twentieth Century (Poetic Drama and Problem Play)

And left you but a ball of passionate dust. Notes
And you proud earth and plumy sea, fade out!
For you may hear no more her faltering feet,
But are left only amid the clamorous war
Of angels upon devils.
Yeats was a dramatist of visions and symbols which were to him
Forms more real than living men;
Nurslings of immortality.
“I had unshakable conviction”, he once remarked, “arising how or whence I cannot tell, that
invisible gates would open as they did for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg.” The “gates”
might not have opened wide for Yeats, but at least some wickets did.

26.1.5 Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938)

Abercrombie’s verse plays, like Deborah (1913), The Adder (1913), The Endofthe World(1914),
Staircase (1920), The Deserter (1922), and Phoenix (1923), struck a note of departure from the
fanciful and symbolical plays of Yeats. Abercrombie had nothing to do with the land of fairies or
mysticism. He was a poet, no doubt, but he was also a realist. He took upon himself the task of
adapting the blank verse of the Elizabethan age to the contingencies of the modern times. Refering
to Abercrombie’s work, Moody and Lovett maintain: “fundamentally, Abercrombie endeavoured
to bring his poetry into close contact with reality. He was not another singer from fairyland as was
Yeats: he deliberately departed from the Elizabethan tradition which kept so many writers of the
past in its thraldom. Consciously he sought to find a form of blank verse expression which might
adequately convey to modern spectators or readers the immediate emotions of our times in terms
of poetry. The powerful resonance of his verse, with its peculiar welding of highly imaginative
language and common expressions presents a notable contribution to dramatic form.”
Abercrombie’s plays are poor in characterisation and stage effects. Moreover, there is a sizable
proportion of narrative which does not fit well into the dramatic framework.

Did u know? Abercrombie scored an advance upon the unthinking Elizabethanism of
Stephen Philips by showing a much greater awareness of contemporary taste
and conditions.

26.1.6 Dr. Gordon Bottomley

Whereas Abercrombie tried to poetise ordinary speech and thus combine poetry with realism, Dr.
Gordon Bottomley endeavoured to ake an altogether new start. In his search for a new poetic
medium he did not turn to the Elizabethans or their Victorian imitators, but the No drama of Japan
and the classical drama of Greece. In his youth Bottomley was an enthusiastic admirer of D. G.
Rossetti in whom he found, to quote himself,
The lost Italian vision, the passionate
Vitality of art more rich than life,
More real than the day s reality.
Later, however, his enthusiasm for aestheticism dwindled considerably. His plays can be roughly
divided into two groups as follows:
The earlier group; and
the lyric, choral plays.
What attracts our attention in the plays of the earlier group is the solidity of Bottomley’s
characterisation and his pleasing inventiveness. These plays include some with Shakespearean

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