Perspectives of Modern Verse Drama

PERSPECTIVES OF MODERN VERSE DRAMA Il\TEREST IN DRA..."\1A has been perennial among poets in every century, although since the eighteenth century there has been an increasing separation between the interests of the stage and the interests of a living poetic art. The results of this separation have been particularly evident in the verse theater, while the theater for prose has maintained an element of sensitivity to current life and art which has long been lost to the poetic drama. It is not until the twentieth century that a group of verse playwrights have attempted to revitalize verse drama for the English-speaking stage by bringing to it the same standards of artistic coherence insisted upon in other fields of creative endeavor. In modem art this artistic coherence has expressed itself in a search for a living form; for a meaningful relationship between content, structure, and language. The conception of verse drama as a formal experience was what had been lost as a result of the increasingly rigid separation on the stage of the domain of poetry and the world of real and vital concerns. Evidence of this separation can be found as early as the stage of the Restoration in the heroic plays of Dryden and his fellow play- \\Tights. The tendency to relegate the use of verse to a highly specialized world-the distant, the vague, the exotic, and the heroichad already begun. There is little need to pursue the point that the prevailing pattern for the verse play-or, to take the more inclusive term, for the poetic play-remained much the same throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even into the revival of verse drama in the early twentieth century by such diverse figures as Cale Young Rice, Gordon Bottomley, Stephen Phillips, and John Drinkwater . The stereotype which had developed called for an elevated and elevating style, a vague and often archaic diction, a remote scene, and unreal characters. The term "poetic drama" had come by the end of the nineteenth century to mean any anti-realistic drama, whether in verse or poetic prose, and such drama usually took one of two roads to escape from reality: the pseudo-historical, involving heroic figures in heroic situations ; or the fantastic, involving a never-never land or symbolic searches for symbolic blue birds. Two of the best-known poetic dramas of the nineties are Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Yet both of these plays are as weak in structural significance as they are abounding in sentiment. And al24 1960 PERsPECI'IVES OF MODERN VERSE DRAMA 25 though "poetic" prose in Pelleas and MeZisande has taken the place of verse, the same exoticism, the same distancing from contemporary meaning, the same weaknesses are present that have been increasingly identified with poetic drama since the eighteenth century. The tradition just described accounts for the early plays of Yeats and continues unbroken into the mid-twentieth century in the work of playwrights like Maxwell Anderson, whose work, in spite of his contemporary efforts, by and large belongs in spirit, aim, and construction to the turn-of-the-century tradition. Anderson's theory led him to the conventional position that verse is to be used as a means of elevation and of ennobling; that the proper subject matter for verse drama, as one would expect, is remote and historic. The weaknesses and restrictions of such a view are obvious in Anderson's own comments: When I wrote my first play, White Desert, I wrote it in verse because I was weary of plays in prose that never lifted from the ground. It failed, and I did not come back to verse until I had discovered that poetic tragedy had never been successfully written about its own place and time.... With this admonition in mind I wrote Elizabeth the Queen and a succession of historical plays in verse.... Winterset is largely verse, and treats a contemporary tragic theme, which makes it more of an experiment than I could wish, for the great masters themselves never tried to make tragic poetry out of the stuff of their own times.1 The result of such an approach is...