ABSTRACT
Biographer Richard Davenport-Hines speaks of the taste for ritual behind W. H. Auden's dramatic project. Auden began his short career as a poetic dramatist with some very Eliotic ideas about the ritual roots of drama. This chapter finds Auden, like Eliot and Yeats, in pursuit of a dramatic ideal that, in the twentieth century, has been lost as often and almost as quickly as it has been found. The trajectory of this pursuit reveals as much about the cultural memories and desires of Europe as it does about the appeal and the difficulty of restoring ritual to the modern theatre. Auden's gifts and disposition as well as his limitations render his plays uniquely capable of bringing the British version of interwar European anxiety vividly before one's eyes. Auden's most important statement on the connection between modern verse drama and the culture of Europe is his lecture, given on December 8, 1938, The Future of English Poetic Drama.
