The English verse dramatists sought to restore verse plays to their central place in the English theatre. T. S. Eliot began with certain advantages over poets like Claudel and Yeats because he had already brought back ordinary words and situations into poetry. Even so he experienced the inevitable difficulties of getting modern characters to speak verse convincingly…. Eliot saw his task as twofold: to overcome the prejudice against verse in the theatre and to prevent the enjoyment of verse for itself. Such enjoyment would distract the audience from the serious purpose of the plays, for Eliot had turned to the theatre to gain a wider audience for the ideas in his poetry.
Because of his great authority as poet and critic, Eliot strengthened the impression that the problem of verse drama was, simply, to find a type of verse that would work on the stage. It has always been a convention of verse drama that there was an agreed type of verse, as the Elizabethans used blank verse or French classicism the alexandrine. Given this basic premise and the dramatic quality of his poetry, Eliot's move into the theatre is extremely logical. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) was, in context, very successful but the context was not the world in which his audience lived and to which they returned at the end of the play. And Canterbury Cathedral was not the commercial theatre; it had a congregation rather than an audience…. Because he suspected that [a] wider audience would have a largely unthinking familiarity with theological matters he decided that such matters, which were the substance of his plays, would have to be presented in secular terms. He therefore modelled his plays on Greek myths which had provided the form for Murder in the Cathedral and now provided matter. He may have been influenced in this by the French dramatists although he works in a different way to them. Rather than rewriting the myth with modern characters he starts with modern characters and filters the myth through them and their actions. The Family Reunion (1939), as Eliot himself recognised, was not successful in adjusting Greek myth to a modern situation and ten years later he corrected this mistake in The Cocktail Party (1949). If the opening of the play reminds us of Noel Coward the basis of the play is the Alcestis of Euripides. Eliot has also removed the exceptional person from the centre of the play, although she still makes her choice and accepts the consequences in a way that suggests existential drama. The verse is largely the poetry of statement and critics have already begun to object that the verse is very nearly prose. Eliot, writing on the poetry of Dr. Johnson, had suggested that the minimum requirement of good poetry is that it has the virtues of good prose. But it is not easy to create a verse which is flexible enough to cover making a telephone call and the crucifixion of Celia. At high moments the verse works…. (pp. 35-7)
