Reviving Modern Verse Drama: T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice

At the beginning of the twentieth century, in response to the dominance of prose drama since the Romantic period, a movement to revive verse drama emerged in Western modernist literature. The revival was not merely a formal return but also part of modernism’s broader endeavor to renew language and redefine the essence of art. Among its leading figures were W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Yeats promoted verse drama primarily through theatrical practice, emphasizing the poetic power of performance, while Eliot sought to construct a systematic theoretical framework. Drawing on literary history, genre, and the nature of literature, Eliot argued for the feasibility and necessity of verse drama: first, that English literature preserved an unbroken tradition of verse drama; second, that poetry and drama are not opposites but complementary forms of artistic expression; and third, that verse drama, compared with prose drama, is better suited to achieve a heightened unity of language and emotion on stage. The sources of Eliot’s theory are manifold. It arose, first, from his critical response to contemporary theater, especially the limitations of prose drama in form and language. Second, he was influenced by ritualist theories of drama advanced by Cambridge anthropologists such as F. M. Cornford, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Gilbert Murray, which stressed the religious and communal dimensions of performance. Third, his views developed through his own creative experiments in poetry and drama, where practice informed theoretical reflection. Although Eliot’s experiments in verse drama did not win widespread critical recognition and often faced challenges in stage realization, they opened new directions for twentieth-century theater. His interventions helped break the long-standing dominance of prose drama and provided inspiration for later playwrights, thereby enriching the formal and thematic diversity of modernist theater.