ABSTRACT
The crucial development in dramatic criticism in English was the abandonment of the procedure whereby most discussion of drama took the form of commentaries on Aristotle or commentaries on commentaries on Aristotle. T. S. Eliot’s whole theory of poetry was dramatic. Not surprisingly, his poetry, at least up to and including The Waste Land, has marked dramatic qualities; Gerontion might be cited as a particularly striking case. Eliot was not alone in writing verse with a marked dramatic quality. W. B. Yeats, too, had read John Donne, and the considerable change in the movement of his verse was towards the dramatic. Eliot’s criticism was a crucial factor, but the full implications of it can best be studied in the work of the critic who undoubtedly stands in an equivalent position to Johnson in his, F. R. Leavis.
