Drama and Realism

Abstract

As we have already seen, for practically the whole of Eliot’s lifetime the Western European theatre was under the influence of dramatic naturalism, an influence he associated with the prevalence of prose drama, perhaps his most sustained comment on the issue being put in the mouth of one of the speakers in his ‘Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry’ (1928):

People have tended to think of verse as a restriction upon drama … [and that] Only prose can give the full gamut of modern feeling, can correspond to actuality. But … are we not merely deceiving ourselves when we aim at greater and greater realism? Are we not contenting ourselves with appearances, instead of insisting upon fundamentals? … I say that prose drama is merely a slight by-product of verse drama. The human soul, in intense emotion, strives to express itself in verse. It is not for me, but for the neurologists, to discover why this is so, and why and how feeling and rhythm are related. The tendency, at any rate, of prose drama is to emphasise the ephemeral and superficial; if we want to get at the permanent and universal we tend to express ourselves in verse.

(Selected Essays, p. 46)