write an essay on the revival of poetic drama and TS. Eliot's contribution to poetic drama
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The 19th century in England, says G.S. Frazer, although rich in other kinds of literature, is weak in drama. Between Sheridan’s School for Scandal and the early Comedies of Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw in the 1890s, no drama of any significance was produced.
The Elizabethan age was a great age of poetic drama, and all through the 19th century practically all the great poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Browning, Arnold, Tennyson, tried their hands at poetic drama, but failed to bring about a revival of this literary genre. As Eliot puts it, at the opening of the century, there were plays written by poets who had no knowledge of the stage, or by men who knew the stage but were no poets at all. The 19th century verse drama failed because it was not a ‘whole’, it was a hotch-potch of farce, rhetoric, and melodrama. Besides this, the shadow of Shakespeare was always there. All verse-dramatists tried to use the traditional blank verse. That is why Galsworthy says, “the shadow of the man Shakespeare was across the path of all who should attempt verse drama in those days.” Further, there was a tradition of Shakespearean scholarship, but the emphasis was laid on the study of individual scenes and passages, rather than on the plays as dramatic wholes.