466
PARTISAN REVIEW
basis of verse when he turned to the theatre. In that case he is a sport,
an accident, a chance event in the theatre. . . .
SOUTH: But
The Confidential Clerk
and
The Cocktail Party
are in verse of a sort and they are good plays.
NORTH: Oh I don't deny that. What I deny is that Eliot has
succeeded in what is the
main
task of a dramatist, which is to produce
a new dramatic system. Ibsen did that, and Strindberg, and Shaw,
Pirandello, and even Giraudoux. Eliot did not, though he did create
a poetic system before he turned his hand to writing plays. Now my
contention is that no play can be truly poetic if it does not express
the discovery of a new dramatic system. Thus we get the paradox that
all the playrights I mentioned wrote dramas fundamentally more poetic
than Mr. Eliot's, though none of them, except for Ibsen in his early
phase, wrote plays in verse. Perhaps I can now formulate more
clearly what seems to me the almost insuperable difficulty of the verse
play in our time. In the past, the creators of new dramatic systems made
their discoveries
in verse,
since verse was the accepted medium. I t is
almost inconceivable that this type of discovery could be made today
in verse, for the creation of an adequate verse for stage purposes would
exhaust the invention of even the most gifted poet. Mr. Eliot's career
in the theater should be a warning that what we are going to get from
the effort to bring poetry to the theater will probably not be a revitaliza–
tion of the theatrical art, but a compromised, flat and diluted poetry,
which can scarcely uplift us either on or off the stage. Have I convinced
you?
SOUTH: My problem is to convince my readers that I am right
about MacLeish's
J.B.
NORTH: And I must convince mine that Djuna Barnes's
The
Antiphon
is no worse than they should have expected.
Lionel Abel
