ABSTRACT
From the first this atavistic trend in avant garde drama was very much a child of its time, reflecting a general intellectual climate that had been produced by literary movements earlier in the nineteenth century. The seeds can be found in the late romantic fascination for the‘night side of nature’, out of which came two related positions, both equally antagonistic to the rationalistic and factual documentation of naturalism. One is well represented by Rimbaud’s notorious claim that‘One must be a visionary…The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense and reasoned derangement of the senses.’ The other can be characterized by the symbolist stress on‘suggestive indefiniteness of vague and therefore spiritual effect’ (Poe).
