Page 201 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes themes-such as King Lear’s Wife and Gruach-which are extremely interesting. Gruach tries to
show the background of Lady Macbeth and succeeds in convincing us psychologically.
In the choral plays Bottomley further removed dramatic dialogue from common speech. His
experiments are quite interesting even though hey could not excite much emulation.

26.1.7 T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

T. S. Eliot has been the greatest shaping force in the literature of the twentieth century-in poetry,
criticism, and drama. Long before he came forward with a poetic play of his own, he had started
defending poetic drama. In The Possibility of Poetic Drama, The Need for Poetic Drama, Aims of
Poetic Drama, and Poetry and Drama he strongly advocated the cause of poetic drama. At one
point, comparing prose and verse as the media of drama, he conveyed his belief that “poetry is the
natural and complete medium of drama, that the prose play is a kind of abstraction capable of
giving you only a part of what the theatre can give, and that the verse play is capable of something
much more intense and exciting.”
But all this verbal pleading would have been of little avail if Eliot had not, with his own practice,
proved the potentialities of poetic drama in the modern age. He wrote some seven poetic plays
which are:
Sweeney Agonistes
The Rock
Murder in the Cathedral
The Family Reunion
The Cocktail Party
The Confidential Clerk
The Elder Statesman
Of all of them Murder in the Cathedral is the most outstanding. Bamber Gascoigne observes in
Twentieth Century Drama: “It is the highest tribute to a poetic drama to say, as one can of Murder
in the Cathedral, that it is both intensely dramatic and inconceivable in prose.”

Notes Eliot’s plays are quite complex (like his poetry), but they are satisfying in their poetry
and the evocation of the desired moods by a wonderful handling of the verse medium.

Others

W. H. Auden in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood wrote some good poetic plays—TTze
Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of, F6, and Frontier. Miss Dorothy Sayers in The Zeal of Thy
House and The Devil to Pay followed T. S. Eliot’s lead in handling religious subject-matter.
Stephen Spender with The Trial of a Judge came out with a powerful poetic play depicting the fate
of Liberals and Socialists in the Nazi Germany of Hitler. This play, as Nicoll points out, “despite its
brilliance in execution, exhibits a burning emotion so consuming as to destroy that simple structure
from which a stage play must be built.” Christopher Fry in his poetic plays imported some
mystical suggestions and philosophical speculations. For this very purpose he preferred verse to
prose. His verse is quite suggestive but is sometimes marred by a little immaturity and
incomprehensibility. Consider an instance showing both his excellence and weakness:
The world is an arrow
Or larksong, shot from the earth’s bow and falling
In a stillborn sunrise.

Task Write a short note on Poetic Drama.

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