On Reserve
Spotlight -
T.S. Eliot
by Artur Wielgus
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965)
T. S. Eliot was an American
playwright, a poet and a literary critic of the Modernism movement.
His plays are set in England.
Murder in the Cathedral is his best action play. It is based on the
real story of the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury
in 1170 on the order of England’s King Henry II. Because Eliot was
experimenting with the play form, it contains a chorus of women of
Canterbury, different meters of verse and a sermon written in prose.
His intention was to completely use verse in drama. Eliot later said
that, “Mixture of prose and verse in the same play should be
generally avoided”. In this play, he used neutral style, committed
neither to the present nor to the past.
The Family Reunion is also a very good play. The action of the play
is in the northern part of England, in Wishwood. Harry, the main
character of the play, who cannot reconcile his past because of his
wife’s tragic death in which he took part, is haunted by the spirit
of his wife and is mentally unstable. He quickly changes his mind
and decides to leave a family reunion before even meeting his two
younger brothers, Arthur and John, who were delayed by car accidents
during bad, foggy weather.
In The Elder Statesman, Eliot describes how fame of the father can
complicate the life of his son Michael to the point that he wants to
leave England and start his life over.
In the play he is helped by Gomez, an acquaintance of his father
from the past college years, who was in jail for forgery. He had
left England, changed his name and made a fortune in a foreign
country to which he later invited Michael as his associate. The
other things in the play are reminiscences of life past, especially
Mrs. Carghill who is invading the privacy of The Elder Statesman,
Mr. Claverton. He was her first love when she was 18.
In The Cocktail Party, the author gets rid of chorus in the play and
later Eliot says, “Verse in drama needs to be as natural as prose.
We have to accustom our audiences to verse rhythm to the point at
which they will cease to be conscious of it and that by using poetry
in a drama, we can better express our emotions. Verse is not merely
a formalization, or an added decoration, but that it intensifies the
drama.” The rhythms of regular blank verse had become too remote
from the movement of modern speech.
According to T.S. Eliot, we need to illuminate and transfigure the
world of our audiences into a poetic drama, which needs to attain
musical order and should come to terms with the ordinary world. Let
us not to be the hollow men; “That corpse you planted last year in
your garden…
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls…” Life is short, art is long.
Posterity immortalizes our work and then nothing can be changed.
© Arthur Wielgus 2007
