"Orthodoxy," "heresy," and other terms from seventeenth-century Christian rhetoric replace such earlier terms as "tradition" and "impersonality." These writings, sympathetically read, suggest the dilemma of the serious student of Western culture in the 1930s, and rightly understood, they complement his poetry, his plays, and his earlier literary journalism.
As a dramatist also, Eliot is an important figure in the twentieth century. He was inclined from the first toward the theater—his early poems are essentially dramatic; many of his early essays and reviews are on drama or dramatists. By the mid 1920s he was writing a drama, Sweeney Agonistes; in the 1930s he wrote The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935), and The Family Reunion (1939); in the 1940s and 1950s he devoted himself almost exclusively to plays, of which The Cocktail Party (1950) has been the most popular. His goal, realized only in part, was the revitalization of poetic drama in terms which would be consistent with the modern age. He experimented endlessly with language which, though close to contemporary speech, is essentially poetic and thus capable of extraordinary spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resonance.
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