The Uncommon Cocktail Party

THE UNCOMMON COCKTAIL PARTY* No STUDENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IS UNAWARE of the importance of the creation and development of blank verse. Yet a great poet, T. S. Eliot, experimented for forty years with the modeling of a '·new" poetic line for contemporary verse drama, and that line has been little understood. It is surely worthwhile to find out why and try to formulate a description of his prosody. The Cocktail Party offers special advantages for such a study. The recording of the New York cast establishes the rhythms of the verse as they were approved by the poet and his director, E. Martin Browne. The text, as it appears, revised, in The Complete Poems and Plays~ I909-I950~ presents a textual source for prosodic analysis. But what is the verse form? Eliot listened to the Edinburgh and Broadway cast in rehearsal and performance; most of the critics mention the performance or the recording; yet their descriptions of the prosody appear totally irreconcilable. Eliot indicated that the verse form in The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party~ and The Confidential Clerk is approximately the same,! and The Elder Statesman~ to all appearances, employs this line also.2 In "Poetry and Drama" the poet described the line he developed for The Family Reunion as a line of three stresses, with a caesura, the number of syllables varying. However, in an interview with Henry Hewes just before The Confidential Clerk went to Scotland , Eliot remarked of his verse dramas in modern setting, "Auden says I have four stresses and he may be right. All I know is that when a line sounds wrong to me, which is the only time I think about the meter, I go back and use the three-stress test."3 But his director, E. Martin Browne, describes the normal line as 4-stress.4 . Various critics have called the form prose, cadenced prose printed as verse (free verse), loose blank verse (iambic pentameter), an adaptation of classical hexameter, or accentual verse-3-stress, 4-stress, or ""Research for this essay was facilitated by a grant from Arizona State University . 1 T. S. Eliot, "Poetry and Drama," On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), pp. 87-88; Henry Hewes, "T. S. Eliot-Confidential Playwright," SatR, XXXVI (August 29, 1953), 26-27. 2 Bernard Kneiger, "The Dramatic Achievement of T. S. Eliot," MD, III (February 1961), 391. 3 Hewes, 28. 4 E. Martin Browne, "The Dramatic Verse of T. S. Eliot," T. S. Eliot, A Symposium , eds. Richard March and Tabbimuttu (London, 1948), pp. 203-204. Cf. my description of the lines of Yeats and Eliot, "Purgatory and The Family Reunion : In Pursuit of Prosodic Description," MD, VII (December 1964), 256-266. 382 1969 THE UNCOMMON COCKTAIL PARTY 383 5-stress. In 1964, when Eliot's attention was called to this astonishing diversity of prosodic description, he replied that he wrote by ear and did not concern himself with rules of scansion.5 Clearly, his experimentation in creating a verse form for modern drama in contemporary setting challenges prosodic description. The Cocktail Party represents Eliot's attempt to write a good drama for the contemporary theater. He employed familiar domestic comedy and a Noel Coward style opening of the play to make the audience forget this was a verse drama. He did not wish the audience to be aware that it was listening to verse except perhaps at moments when it achieved the intensity of poetry. He avoided shifting from prose to verse lest the change distract the attention of the audience from the drama. Audience recognition of the verse could not justify the use of it, nor could use of a verse form alone make the drama poetic, but the achievement of "poetry" through verse at moments of emotional depth and intensity would serve to justify the technique employed .6 Description of this technique is made possible by comparison of the textual clues to rhythm with the performance of the Broadway cast. The Decca recording of The Cocktail Party employs a text substantially the same as that which appears in The Complete Poems and Plays.7 For the recording the play was edited by the director, who cut much...