Another Renaissance: The Decadent Poetic Drama of A. C. Swinburne and Michael Field

Abstract

In an early 1920 essay entitled ‘The Possibility of Poetic Drama’ for the American nineteenth-century journal turned modernist literary maga- zine The Dial, T. S. Eliot explained that though the question ‘why is there no poetic drama today’ had ‘become insipid, almost academic’, it had to be raised again because poets and audiences wanted verse plays.² Reacting against the legacy of poetic dramas in the nineteenth century, Eliot pro- vocatively suggested that the genre had been pronounced dead by Charles Lamb’s 1808 study Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, a book that exhumed ‘the remains of dramatic life at its fullest’ and ‘brought a consciousness of the immense gap between present and past’. Eliot killed thus nineteenth-century verse drama at a stroke, astonishingly arguing that ‘the relation of [Shelley’s] The Cencito the great English drama’ was ‘almost that of a reconstruction to an origi- nal’. ‘By losing a tradition’, he went on, ‘we lose our hold on the present; but so far as there was any dramatic tradition in Shelley’s day there was nothing worth keeping. There is all the difference between preservation and restoration.’³ The essay then moved on to discuss the reasons why Elizabethan poetic drama had been and still was in the twentieth century so successful by curiously explaining why nineteenth-century poetic drama was not.