ABSTRACT
This chapter considers British verse drama of the 1930s, focusing on the poets associated with London’s Group Theatre—T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Cecil Day-Lewis—as a forerunner to the Absurd. In particular, the stabbing rhythms of speech, the “lurking violence,” and the “hellish stasis” of habitual action found in Eliot’s 1932 play Sweeney Agonistes are often compared to characteristic elements of Samuel Beckett’s drama, beginning with Kenneth Tynan’s first acknowledgement of this supposed lineage in the early sixties. Both Spender and MacNeice, in reviews, lectures, and journal entries, recognized an array of correspondences between the Absurd and verse drama, including their own half-forgotten experiments. Spender, intriguingly, considered Harold Pinter a close confidant and would later consult the younger writer when revising his poetry and plays. Spender and MacNeice recognized their own drama to be part of a larger project that included the Absurd—a distinctively English-language tradition of reimagining how voiced utterance, movement, and metaphor operate together both on and off the stage.
