The Family Reunion to The Elder Statesman

Abstract

One of Eliot’s supreme dramatic aims, as he tells us in ‘Poetry and Drama’, was to bring poetry into the familiar world of the telephone, radio, and motor-car. He hoped that audiences would feel they could speak the same language, and acquire poetic perceptions which would help to transform the dreary round of their lives. In The Family Reunion (1939), his first complete stage presentation of contemporary life, his chief technical concern was the creation of verse close to speech but capable of ranging from pure poetry to the commonplace without seeming unnatural or absurd. In this, and his later plays, he is so successful that any rare oddity such as the heavily classical diction of ‘batrachian’ stone or the ‘aphyllous branch ophidian’ creates only a momentary impediment. There are times when the flow of language is too unbrokenly smooth, when we feel it would gain from the more arresting kind of dramatic intensity that is found in ‘Gerontion’. In general it conforms to the standards enunciated in ‘Little Gidding’: ‘easy commerce of the old and the new’, ‘neither diffident nor ostentatious’, the common words being ‘exact without vulgarity’, and the formal, ‘precise but not pedantic’.