Dr Nemika AssistantProfessor Department of English Dayanand Arya Kanya Degree College, Moradabad
DEFINITION OF POETIC DRAMA
As the term ‘Poetic Drama’ itself suggests it is a kind of drama where verse are spoken instead of normal conversational dialogues. It is composed in poetic form with an intention of dramatic presentation on stage.
The poetic drama is a great achievement of the modern age. It is a mixture of high seriousness and colloquial element. It is the combination of the tradition and the experiment and of the ancient and the new. It is symbolic and difficult. Its verse form is blank verse or free verse. In short, its vehicle is verse, its mechanism is imagery, its substance is myth and its binding force is musical pattern.
Victorian poets attended poetic drama but they could not impart to it real dramatic excellence because the conditions of the stage were not favourable for the stage. It could not be produced either in the 18th century which was an age of great prose writers, or in the 19th century, which was an age of great poets. Only there were signs of the rebirth of poetic drama by 1920 but the atmosphere in which realistic and naturalistic drama prospered was not congenial to the growth and development of poetic drama.
English poetic drama in the present century arose as a reaction to the naturalistic prose drama of Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy. By the second decade of the century, this prose drama had reached a dead end. On the whole, this prose drama, in a decadent stage after the best work of Shaw, had failed to grasp the depth, tension and complexity of contemporary life.
Irish dramatists, like W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, also played a significant part in the moment for the revival of verse play. Other great names in the revival movement are John Masefield, Cristopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cristopher Fry.
At the Abbey theatre W. B. Yeats endeavoured to revive poetic drama, but his genius was lacking the essential qualities of a dramatist. It was T. S. Eliot who firmly established the tradition of poetic drama in the 20th century. The remarkable element of poetic drama is that these dramas were influenced by the religious beliefs or social attitudes of their authors.
W.B. Yeats was against realistic problem play and he was promoted to reconstruct contemporary life through the symbols of ancient folklore and the mythology of Ireland. In order to make the audience concentrate on poetry Yeats went back to the simplicity of Greek theatre and Shakespearean theatre. His early plays The Countess Cathleen and The Land of Heart’s Desire deal with the realisation of the spiritual theme. In his most successful play On Baile’s Strand Yeats achieves an end for which all important drama in this in the century has sought the interpretation of different levels of reality in an integral and controlled structure. His other plays too are rich in poetical intensity.
However, it is T.S. Eliot who, both through his theory and practice of poetic drama, has achieved considerable success in establishing tradition of poetic plays in the 20th century. He had a full understanding of the nature of poetic drama, the difference between verse drama and prose drama, the causes of the failure of 19th century verse dramatists, the problem, technical and otherwise, which face a writer of verse plays in the modern age.
His verse-plays are not concerned with socio-economic problems; they are concerned not with the outer, but with the inner emotional and psychic realities. Thus the core of his first play, Murder in the Cathedral, is the psychic struggle of the hero with the temptations offered to him, and that of The Family Reunion the psychological guilt-complex of Harry, the hero of the play; The Cocktail Party is a study in the awareness of personal inadequacies of married life in the modern context. In these plays, he has also demonstrated the relevance of religion to all human activity. They are all Christian plays, the purpose of the dramatist being, “to train people to be able to think in Christian categories.”
Christopher Fry’s The Lady is Not for Burning is an important experiment in verse technique. it is an excellent comedy. Christopher Fry is a poetic dramatist of originality and daring who has restored to English drama something of the verbal sprightliness and the relish of the exploratory and suggestive use of language that we get in the Elizabethans.
His another poetic play Venus Observed is written in simple poetic language and it is an interesting comedy.
Though poetic drama has been written time to time through the various ages of English Literature but it is only during the twentieth century that poetic drama established itself as an important dramatic form.
English Learners 