The subject of all art is passion, and a passion can only be contemplated when separated by itself, purified of all but itself, and aroused into perfect intensity by opposition with some other passion.—W. B. Yeats, “The Irish Dramatic Movement”
And one of the three great things in the world is gossip, you know.—Robert Frost
Not long ago, around the middle of the last century, it was possible for a poet to have a play on Broadway. Archibald MacLeish’s verse play J.B., directed by Elia Kazan, ran for nearly a year in New York and received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best play in 1959.1 Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days, a verse drama about Anne Boleyn and Henry viii, was a smash when it opened with Rex Harrison in 1948, and later became an Oscar-winning film with Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold (though only snippets of blank verse were retained for the film, such as Anne’s Tower speech.)
Leafing through Kenneth Tynan’s reviews of the 1950s reveals that, far from being a high-brow writer of closet dramas, T. S. Eliot was a noted British playwright of his day, regularly produced on the London stage. It would not be going too far to say that W. B. Yeats, whose groundbreaking verse plays include the Noh-inflected At the Hawk’s Well (1920) and the bleak and stirring Purgatory (1938), helped to found modern
