The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946

Poetic Drama To-Day and To-Morrow

On 5 May 1940 Sean O’Faolain contacted TSE on behalf of the Irish Academy of Letters, as its Secretary, inviting him to deliver the first Yeats Memorial Lecture and offering, “with apologies and blushes,” an honorarium of five guineas. He then added, “If you felt so inclined we could arrange for a broadcast talk the following afternoon, which would add another five guineas. You are certain to have some material that you would not need to prepare, for that.” TSE wrote Radio Éireann on 31 May on the question of subject matter: “I could talk about Yeats himself – that would be really an abbreviated version of my lecture. Or I could talk generally about the present situation and future of Poetic Drama. Or I could, of course, give a reading of my own verse: I suppose that you have a relatively wider public for poetry readings than we have here.” The decision for poetic drama was probably made by the Irish poet Roibeárd Ó Faracháin (Robert Farren), the Talks Officer, who introduced TSE in the live broadcast and was shortly to become a director of the Abbey Theatre.

TSE read this untitled and unpublished text (TS carbon, 6 pp with holograph emendations), announced by Radio Éireann as “Poetic Drama To-Day and To-Morrow,” at 7:30 pm on 1 July.

Yesterday, in talking about William Butler Yeats to an audience at the Abbey Theatre, I spoke of his contribution to the art of poetic drama. ¹ I made one point which I must repeat; that of our debt to Yeats, to his colleagues of the Abbey, and to the men and women who have acted there, for keeping the poetic drama alive at a time when, but for them, it would have seemed to be utterly and forever rejected from the stage. It is a debt of which all those who struggle, in England and in America, to keep this form in the theatre, must be keenly aware. I want now to indicate briefly some of the reasons why it is now and always worth while for us to go on writing plays in verse.

Your Dublin audiences are, I believe, more qualified to appreciate verse drama than ours, just as your actors speak verse more naturally. But some of the prejudices against, and even some of the more unreasonable prejudices for, verse drama, may be in our time widespread. For the English audience, certainly, there is Shakespeare, and there is everything else. When people go to a modern verse play, they feel virtuous about it: and nothing more surely interferes with the appreciation of a work of art than for people to 92approve of themselves for appreciating it. They go to a poetic play in somewhat the same spirit in which they go to a charity entertainment given by incompetent amateurs – out of a sense of duty. In this way they do not expect enough, and I am afraid that sometimes authors respond by not giving enough; they feel, also, that in writing a verse play they have done something meritorious which excuses them from being judged by the ordinary standards of the theatre. Now I have always maintained that the first duty of the poet is the same as that of any other entertainer – that is, to be entertaining; and if this is the duty of a poet in writing a poem which he may expect the reader to read several times, how much more so in writing for an audience, whose attention has to be captured at once and held all the time? The poet has to be trained to do his job in the theatre, and the audience has to be trained to respond to it; but a large part of the audience’s training consists in learning to be spontaneous and to be ready to admit it to themselves, when they are bored by his play, as readily as they would admit it of an ordinary commercial play.

There is another difficulty related to the...