Yeats on the Possibility of an English Poetic Drama

YEATS ON THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ENGLISH POETIC DRAMA* THE pATTERNS OF EDUCATION developed in any age and the valuejudgements subsumed by them usually have a direct bearing on the conscious ambitions and strivings of the writers of the time. The wide dissemination of the Latin classics encouraged the men of the Restoration and the eighteenth century to lay a premium on heroic poetry that to us seems strange for an age otherwise so unheroic . Likewise, the taking of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to the schoolroom and the steady rise in their reputations have bred through the last century and a half an almost unending succession of experimental verse-plays and an ever-increasing body of critical writing on the nature of poetic drama and its possibilities in our time. Caught in this literary-educational context, the contemporary Western student of English literature may fail to observe anything unusual; but to the outsider it does seem odd that an age which produced The Waste Land~ Finnegans Wake~ and the Cantos~ should yet be so acutely interested in the revival of poetic drama, its interest with some almost amounting to a psychological fixation. As already stated, one of the results of this fixation has been the steady accumulation of a large body of critical writing on poetic drama. Turning through this impressive critique, one invariably finds the name of William Butler Yeats heading the list of luminaries who made English poetic drama a practical possibility in the twentieth century. To him is accorded the credit of having finally led English writers out of the cul de sac in which nineteenth century poet-dramatists had landed themselves and their successors, making a living poetic theatre possible. Already in 1936, when Murder in the Cathedral was being acclaimed as the first great poetic play since the Jacobean age, its author reminded his admirers in a broadcast: It is to Mr. William Butler Yeats more than to anyone else that we owe the revival of poetic drama in our times. Listener~ Nov. 25, 1936·In citing Yeats's works I use the following abbreviations: Auto: Autobiographies (London), 1951 E & I: Essays & Introductions (London), 1961 p & C: Plays & Controversies (London), 1923 195 196 MODERN DRAMA September Not long after, the late Prof. Una Ellis-Fermor, after a more scholarly investigation, arrived at a similar conclusion: Against a background of English drama following Ibsen in the serious prose discussion play, or degrading him in the automatic problem play, following the Elizabethans at long distance in the pseudo poetic play or continuing the more recent traditions of farce, domestic melodrama or the French piece bien faite" stands the figure of Yeats, the man who from his own innate wisdom and with no help from any dramatic tradition then at work in Europe, led the drama of the English-speaking people back to the paths of poetry and power, making way, in both countries [Ireland and England], for the first body of plays which can seriously compare with the Elizabethans. The Irish Dramatic Movement (1939), p. 61 By the time Yeats died, this assumption seemed to have grown so general that Mr Eliot, delivering the first Yeats Lecture in 1940, could say with unquestioning assurance: We can begin to see now that even the imperfect early attempts he made are probably more permanent literature than the plays of Shaw; and that his dramatic work as a whole may prove a stronger defense against the successfu,l urban Shaftsbury Avenue vulgarity which he opposed as stoutly as they [i.e., Shaw and his school] .... [Through him] the idea of poetic drama was kept alive when everywhere else it had been driven underground. I do not know where our debt to him as a dramatist ends-and in time, it will not end until that drama itself ends. On Poetry &- Poets (Faber, 1957), p. 261 Since then almost every volume that has appeared on the subjectMr . Raymond Williams' Drama From Ibsen To Eliot or Prof. Denis Donoghue's The Third Voice, to mention only two-has inevitably ~ returned to the same note. But if, after hearing the litany of the Establishment, one turns to Yeats himself, one cannot but experience a shock...