T. S. Eliot's verse drama

Abstract

The aspirations of many of England's greatest poets seem to indicate that there is more than a little to be said for the theory that the poet, as he perfects his art, tend to move from the lyric to the epic and thence to the dramatic, the most genuinely creative of genres. If poetry is language raised to its highest power and drama is that form of representation which allows greatest concentration of effect, the fusion of the two should substantiate Eliot's claim that "the greatest drama is poetic drama,2

Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p.50.