Abstract
In an early 1920 essay entitled ‘The Possibility of Poetic Drama’ for the American nineteenth-century journal turned modernist literary maga- zine The Dial, T. S. Eliot explained that though the question ‘why is there no poetic drama today’ had ‘become insipid, almost academic’, it had to be raised again because poets and audiences wanted verse plays.2 Reacting against the legacy of poetic dramas in the nineteenth century, Eliot pro- vocatively suggested that the genre had been pronounced dead by Charles Lamb’s 1808 study Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, a book that exhumed ‘the remains of dramatic life at its fullest’ and ‘brought a consciousness of the immense gap between present and past’. Eliot killed thus nineteenth-century verse drama at a stroke, astonishingly arguing that ‘the relation of [Shelley’s] The Cencito the great English drama’ was ‘almost that of a reconstruction to an origi- nal’. ‘By losing a tradition’, he went on, ‘we lose our hold on the present; but so far as there was any dramatic tradition in Shelley’s day there was nothing worth keeping. There is all the difference between preservation and restoration.’3 The essay then moved on to discuss the reasons why Elizabethan poetic drama had been and still was in the twentieth century so successful by curiously explaining why nineteenth-century poetic drama was not.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, The Dial, 69.5 (1920), pp. 441–7
T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), p. 54.
See Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 15.
Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Macmillan and Co., 1917), p. 219.
David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 70.
Arthur Symons, ‘The Idea of Richard Wagner’, in Studies in Seven Arts (London: Archibald Constable, 1906), p. 251.
See Eric Chafe, The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Yvonne Nilges, Richard Wagner’s Shakespeare (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007).
T. S. Eliot, ‘Swinburne as Poet’ in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), p. 131.
Walter Pater, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ in Harold Bloom, Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: A Signet Classic, 1974), p. 190.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Tragedies of Algernon Charles Swinburne in Five Volumes (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905), II, p. 142.
Gaynell Callaway Spivey ‘Swinburne’s Use of Elizabethan Drama’, Studies in Philology, 41.2 (1944), pp. 250–63.
Michael Field, ‘Preface’ to The Tragic Mary (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890), pp. vi
W. B. Yeats, Plays and Controversies (London: MacMillan, 1924), p. 33.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Ana Parejo Vadillo
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vadillo, A.P. (2013). Another Renaissance: The Decadent Poetic Drama of A. C. Swinburne and Michael Field. In: Hall, J.D., Murray, A. (eds) Decadent Poetics. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137348296_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137348296_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46762-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-34829-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)