| Summary: | <p>This thesis examines a largely occluded and misunderstood movement in early twentieth century cultural history, when a significant number of poets and critics made repeated calls for the revival of ‘poetic drama,’ not as a coterie form, but as a viable alternative to the commercial theatre of their time. Throughout this period, writers including Stephen Phillips, Gordon Bottomley, John Drinkwater, Wilfrid Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie and, ultimately, T.S. Eliot persistently delineated what they perceived as the need to restore to the theatre what had once been its more lofty functions. The theatre was a place where the real, it was suggested, could and should meet the ideal and renew the status of art as a crucial correspondence to an unassailable and timeless truth, restoring the ties of a fractured community.</p>
<p>The eventual demise of this movement left an extraordinary body of writing in a kind of limbo, where it has since received little attention. A few critical studies have focused on the plays as literary artefacts and with a qualitative eye. In doing so, they obscure the broader critical and philosophical discourse that had been carrying and giving meaning to creative experiments in poetic drama since the turn of the century. Without that frame, this thesis argues, such experiments make little if any sense.</p>
<p>This thesis places the story of the poetic drama in a broader history of ideas, with particular attention to the school of idealist metaphysics and moral philosophy that was dominant in the early decades of the twentieth century. In doing so it illuminates not only how very misunderstood the poetic dramatists have been from the point of view of cultural history, but also the riches that lie in their writings, both creative and critical, for our understanding of early twentieth century intellectual history more broadly.</p>
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