The Poet as Playwright

by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

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ONE would feel happier about the future of poetry on the stage were it not for the defensiveness of those who proclaim it. Poetry had used the theatre and the theatre had used poetry for thousands of years before prose took over but our contemporaries — even the best of them, even Mr. Eliot — go on as though the play in verse still required justification. “No play,” said Mr. Eliot at Harvard four years ago, “should be written in verse for which prose is dramatically adequate. “ That judgment might have been expected from a Broadway critic, most of whom would put the period after the word “verse,” but it has a defunctive sound in the mouth of the most successful dramatic poet of our generation. If Mr. Eliot admits it, then prose is indeed the appropriate language for the modern stage and the poet can be welcomed only on those rare occasions when prose has already failed.

And yet dramatic poetry has flourished under many and various conditions in the past and ours is an age. in which it might very conceivably be expected to flourish again. When an age is an age of actions as ours is, and when men live in confusion and die in ignorance for lack of that very perception of the meaning of their acts which poetry on the stage has given in other times and places, and which prose has yet to give in like measure or with a comparable intensity, a renewal of dramatic poetry would seem possible. We go back willingly enough in our generation to those mirrors of human meaning which poetic drama has provided to earlier men: we go back to Julius Caesar and to Macbeth and above all to Hamlet. Why then do we advise the playwrights of our own time, who know its temper and who live with its persistent questions, to write in prose wherever prose will serve?

An obvious explanation would be that ours is an “unpoetic” generation. We hear it said often enough and every now and again we run across a writer who does his best, consciously or unconsciously, to prove it true. But the fact is, first, that, we aren’t “unpoetic,” and, second, that it would not explain our attitude toward poetry on the stage if we were, and, finally, that the theory in any case would scarcely account for Mr. Eliot, who is so far from being “unpoetic” that he is one of the principal poets now alive. Books of poetry do not sell by the thousands of copies per day as some of Byron’s did, but they are read—Yents, for example, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies — far more seriously and to far greater purpose. The reading of poetry for “pleasure” may have gone out with the first Romantics, and its passing may very properly bo regretted, but the reading of poetry for understanding has more than taken its place. And not among the specialists alone. Upwards of five thousand people sat in a raw wind in the Public Garden in Boston on a June evening last year to listen to Robert Frost; and Boston, as those who read its newspapers are aware, is no longer the city of the Brahmins.

No, something more than an imaginary aversion to poetry is involved in our skittishness about verse in the theatre, and Mr. Eliot’s dictum indicates pretty clearly, I think, what it is. The trouble lies not in our feeling about poetry but in our feeling.about the theatre. To say that no play should be written in verse for which prose is dramatically adequate is to say something, not about verse, but about the nature of a play, or rather about the conception of a play which is current at this particular time and place. Mr. Eliot is not saying that prose is better than verse for most purposes. Mr. Eliot is saying that, a play, as we conceive of it (for he is not offering his advice to Aeschylus or Racine), is something which, by its nature, demands prose wherever prose will serve.

Before we ask the appropriate question, why? there is an incidental assumption underlying all this, as it underlies so much similar talk, which must be examined. It is an assumption which comes oddly from Mr. Eliot. I refer to the implicit idea that ihe choice of verse or prose is a free choice which a playwright may make on rational or at least technical grounds. Few poets — Yeats on occasion and a very few others have been tempted to write plays in prose and no prose writers, with Mr. Maxwell Anderson as the distinguished exception to prove the rule, have been tempted to write plays in verse. What is more likely to happen is what seems to have happened to Mr. Eliot himself: a poet wishing to write for the stage undertakes to write as poet and makes il his task to teach himself how, as poet, to make his poetry dramatic. Or a prose writer, similaily seduced, labors to adapt his prose to his new medium without a thought to the possibility that he might turn himself into a poet first. The figure of the playwright with a plot in mind, debating with himself whether to write it out in verse or prose, is thus a figure made of straw. In most eases the decision will have been made in advance, and in any case the play itself will have at least as much to say about the result as the playwright or the critic who advises him. But this latter is a dark subject to which wc must return.

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THE question to be answered first is the question Mr. Eliot poses. Why should prose take precedence in the contemporary theatre? Mr. Eliot explains with his usual lucidity and patience, Ihe difference between prose and verse on the stage is not that one is nalural and the other artifieial: both are artificial. The difference is that theatre audiences, either because they make no distinction between the talk they hear at home and the talk they hear in a prose dialogue, or because they aie able to ignore the distinction when they do notice it, think of prose on the stage as natural whereas poetry on the stage, being noticeably different from the talk at home, seems to them artificial. Audiences, in other words, are conscious of the poetry as poetry but not conscious of the prose as prose. And this consciousness of the poetry as poetry is a dramatic liability, whether the audience likes the poelry or dislikes it, lor it gets in the way of the dramatic action. Which seems to mean that il gels in the way of the audiences acceptance of the lifelikeness of the dramatic action.

We are ihiis given the measure of the dramatic superiority of prose to verse. The measure is the audiences willingness to accept what it hears as “true to life.” The dramatic demands of the contemporary stage are the demands imposed by an audience which wishes to receive a particular illusion from the actions it witnesses and the words it, hears: the illusion that it is seeing and hearing life the way it is. It is this measure, Mr. Eliot is saying, which determines the superiority of prose for most plays. And it is this measure also which determines, for Mr. Eliot, the superiority of verse on those occasions when prose is inadequate and verse should take its place. He puts it this way. . . beyond the namable, classifiable emotions and motives of our conscious life when directed towards action — the part of life which prose drama is wholly adequate to express — there is a fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can never completely focus. . . . This peculiar range of sensibility can be expressed by dramatic poetry, at its moments of greatest intensity.”

That there is such a range of sensibility, a range which can only be expressed by that, particular organization of language which poetry is that organization which combines, as Coleridge saw, an unusual degree of order with an unusual degree of freedom from order — all readers of poetry will acknowledge. Only those who, through ignorance of poetry, are ignorant of the existence of the sensibility it expresses will question Mr. Eliot s statement. But what is important here is not the truth of the statement but the use to which it is being put. Poetry, Mr. Eliot says, is permissible on the stage in dealing with actions which impinge on this “fringe of feeling” not merely because poetry is capable of the expression of these feelings whereas prose is not, but because, when such feelings are involved, the theatre audience trill accept poetry as “true to life.” Mr. Eliot is explicit about it. The audience, he says, should find “at the moment of awareness that it is hearing poetry, that it is saying to itself: ‘I could talk in poelry too!' ”

Both the rule and the exception, therefore, are justified on the same ground —the audience’s acceptance of the language in either case as true to life or likelike. What is involved, in other words, is a preconception of ihe nature of the illusion the modern stage is expected to create. If you take the position that the language of the theatre should be the language which audiences regard as most like actual talk, or, in the exceptional case, as most like the language they themselves would use under the emotional circumstances, you are assuming that the illusion the contemporary theatre exists to create is the illusion of actuality.

Now there is, of course, wide support for this conception of the demands of contemporary audiences. In that part of our theatre to which the invidious, and not infrequently envious, adjective “commercial is applied, the illusion ol the actual is the standard target. Every!hing is made as much like itself as possible and the appetite which is satisfied is the appetite the newspapers arouse. But because the illusion of the actual is the illusion served by the contemporary theatre in its most successful forms it does not necessarily follow that the illusion of the actual is the only illusion the stage can provide or our generation is capable of accepting. Nor does it follow that a modern defense of poetry on the stage must ground itself on that restricted foundation.

I have nothing but admiration for Mr. Eliot’s gallant purpose to reconquer a place on the contemporary stage for poetry by bringing poetry into overt competition, as he phrases il, with prose. Prose has had the stage pretty much to itself for the past hundred years largely because poetry has refused to compete with it, preferring instead to retire to a private literary world of its own where, to all dramatic intents and purposes, it has palely perished. Plays have been written in verse for generations and no one has cared, not even the versifiers— least of all, indeed, the versifiers. If there is one body of printed matter to which the contemporary poet does not wish to return, it is to the body — carcass rather — of double-columned pages produced in the name of drama by the poets of the nineteenth century. Mr. Eliot is the first poet of distinction and stature to attempt to invade the public stage as public stage in a very long time, Yeats alone excepted.

But greatly as one must admire Mr. Eliot’s good sense and gallantry, one must question, notwithstanding, the strategy he has adopted. Granted that the stage is a battlefield where a play must fight for its life in competition with other plays and under conditions established by the sensibility of the audience, whatever the audience of the moment may be, it does not inevitably follow that the field can be won only by emulating the contemporary masters and accepting the dramatic illusion they have so successfully exploited.

There are other illusions within the capacity of the stage and there are other illusions within the reach of the human heart. There is, for one example, the illusion — very different, from the illusion of the actual of the real. Virginia Woolf’s casual suggestion in her Diary that the t.esl of a novel is its power to “enhance one’s vision of life” defines the difference. The illusion of 1 he real is 1 he illusion, whether in the novel or on the stage, not that this is the actual man, true to life, but that this is the man himself: not that this action is an action like life but that, this action is life — what life really is. It is an illusion which the stage knows well and has known since its beginnings. The plot of Oedipus with its long-forgotten murder and its sudden rush of discoveries is as improbable in any actual terms as a plot could be, but the illusion Oedipus creates is an illusion of the revelation of the web of human fate which men have accepted as a perception of the reality of their lives for thousands of years. Shakespeare’s Tempest is as remote from actuality as Prospero’s island but its metaphor is a metaphor which tells us more about ourselves than any newspaper has ever told us. Yeats’s Purgatory has no prototype in actuality but it casts its shadow in the country where things are.

Moreover, as these examples suggest, the illusion of the real is an illusion which dramatic poetry can pursue at least as well as dramatic prose. The illusion of the real is indeed the principal business of poetry. It is to know our own reality as living, feeling beings that poetry is writ ten and that poe’.ry is read. And l he theatre does not differ from the printed page in this regard. The power of Shakespeare’s finest plays to penetrate the human mystery is a power given them in great pari by their poetry, as every listening audience knows.

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WHY then should a defense of poetry on the modern stage be written on the assumption that the sole illusion permissible to the stage is the illusion of the actual? The answer, in Mr. Eliot’s case, is apparently that modern audiences will accept nothing else — that modern audiences wish to regard the stage not as a stage for art but as a peephole into actuality and that the playwright must accept that fact, shaping his language to meet, the public expectation. An actual couple in an actual bar would not address each other in verses and therefore this couple on the stage, committed by their observers to an actuality as strict as that of a newspaper column, must not speak in verses either. To introduce verse would be to ask the audience to accept a dramatic convention and modern audiences detest dramatic conventions.

Well, they may think they do but the fact is, of course, that no convention could conceivably be more conventional than the convention of the modern peephole theatre by which some hundreds of human beings sit solidly on rows of soft substantial seats agreeing to pretend the man and woman on the stage are quite alone and no one else is there. An audience which will accept the convention of its own absence from the theatre where il sils will accept anything. I doubt, however, that the question really is one of conventions. I should guess that it was a question, rather, of the immutability of that attitude of modern audiences to which Mr. Eliot attaches such overriding importance.

There is no question, of course, but that, the expectation of the audience is a limiting factor so far as the playwright is concerned. Does it, however, follow that that expectation is an immutable and fixed condition about which the playwright can do nothing? Do audiences accept the verse of Shakespeare’s plays because they have been taught in school they should, or do they accept it because the expectations the plays arouse in them are expectations with which the verse accords? I should guess, the latter. I should guess that what enables Shakespeare’s people to speak poetry even to a modern audience is the fact that it is poetry the audience expects and, furthermore, that that expectation is one the play itsell creates. The plays do not offer to present the world of actuality. They are, quite frankly, plays — works of art. Which is to say that they are, like all works of art, worlds complete in themselves: worlds in which the speaking ol verse is accepted as naluralK as the colors of a picture. Because Hamlet offers, not a glimpse of the private life of a Danish court, but a perception of the nature of the human heart, the language of poetry seems not inappropriate to it, even in ears where poetry is seldom heard.

But if this is true of Shakespeare why may it not be true for lesser men? Why may not the justification of verse on the stage, even in a lime like ours, be found in the play itself? Mr. Eliot insists, and rightly I think, that there are no “poetic subjects”: no subjects for plays which, by their nature, call for verse. A poetic drama may be made out of any experience of which men are capable, no matter how ordinary or, as the word goes, prosaic. But because there are no poetic subjects — no inherently poetic actions — it does not follow that there are no poetic organization of action — no organizations of action on the stage which require poetry for their realization. An action so organized as to reveal not only its dramatic Character, but its human significance, demands much of its language. And it is when the expressive demands are heaviest that prose gives way. Prose is a magnificent instrument of communication, but when understanding must be achieved, not by the mind but by the emotions as well, by the senses, by the whole being, poetry which reaches the mind through the senses and the emotions, which calls the whole being into play, goes on alone. There is no equivalent in prose for the lyric poem for the self-evident reason that it is precisely what distinguishes poetry from prose that makes the lyric poem — the ultimate margin.

The fundamental justification for poetry on the stage, in other words, is not the one given by Mr. Eliot. It is not that the audience finds itself feeling, at a given moment of emotional intensification, “I could talk in poetry too! The fundamental justification lies in the play itself, in the illusion the play undertakes to create, in the kind of understanding the play communicates. To go far one must go by art. To go farthest one must use art in its ultimate resource. The question at that point is no longer a question of the naturalness of the language spoken on the stage. ‘The only question there is a question of the language’s effectiveness. An audience does not accept the poetry of the end of Antony and Cleopatra because “I could talk in pod ry too! but because there are no other words than these to say what is being said.

But the point is not that Mr. Eliot’s theory and example arc open to question. Mr. Eliots great reputation is secure. The point is that the conception of poetry on the stage as a mere means of expression, alternative to prose, the use of which is justified only in the case of certain inexplicable feelings, distracts attention from the true problem of the modern dramatic poet. The true problem is live problem of the poetic organization of action in such a time as ours. To regain the stage in its own character, not as a mere emulation of prose, poetry must find its own poetic way to the mastery the stage demands — the mastery of action. What poetry in English has lost is not expressive skill. The craftsmanship of the art of verse is at a high point in this country and in England. What poetry has lost is the power to imitate an action. It has become inward and reflective to such a point that the great metaphors of action, which are the true figures of the poetic stage, are beyond its competence. Until it can people the stage again with actions which are at once poetry and drama, poetic drama will not exist.

That end will not be achieved by adopting for poetry the illusion of the actual. The poet who adopts the illusion of the actual can bring poetry to the stage only by half persuading his audience that it is prose they are attending: the better he succeeds as playwright the less he will succeed as poet. Poetry will return to the stage, not when its presence is concealed, but when the audience is brought to expect it and, expecting it, to need it. That expectation only the illusion of the real can create. The poet as playwright must so manage his actions and his language as to produce the illusion that the world of his play is a world in which reality may itsell appear as the God may come to the bridge in one of the ancient Noh plays of Japan.