ABSTRACT
No one should miss reading this play, if it happens, as may well be, to prove a failure on the stage. As an imaginative work of art, a book to read, it compares with the most sensitive of the short novels by Henry James. It is fashionable to say boldly that there is no place in the library for the dramatic poem; poetic drama is written for the stage, we are told, and if it fails there, it is useless. But just conceivably the poetic drama is developing in two directions; one, in the plays of Auden and Isherwood, certainly towards the theatre; the other, of which this play is a striking example, towards narrative poetry.
