ABSTRACT
Mr. Eliot’s experiment in domestic drama is an even more decisive technical triumph than ‘Murder in the Cathedral,’ not because it contains actually better verse but because the problem to be solved was more difficult and he does well with it. The martyrdom of Thomas, the subject of his first play, seems naturally ‘poetic,’ but it is another thing to make credible an apparition of the Eumenides at Wishwood. We have known the specifications of this kind of play for a long time: it must give us a prevailing surface of dialogue so close to prose in its rhythms and sentiments as to create the illusion of common reality, but it must also manage to invest its matter with the urgency which we associate with verse. To be prosaic: to be literary: – these are the poet’s Scylla and Charybdis. It seems pretty certain that Mr. Eliot has come through more prosperously than any of his predecessors. His conversational lines have a surface which we recognize as the familiar level of prose, but when we venture on it, we feel it to be precarious; maintained, as it were, not by gravitation but by an unnatural tension. Beneath, and momentarily breaking through, is the real world, a world of poetry in which people see strange sights and say things never heard in any drawing-room.
