Perspectives on Modern Verse Drama

INTEREST IN DRAMA 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.