W. B. YEATS’ CONTRIBUTION TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POETIC DRAMA THABIT SHIHAB AHMED AHMED University of Craiova Abstract: The paper analyses two of Yeats’ dramatic works and his historical experiment in the theatre. Undoubtedly, Yeats’ poetry has been much examined and explored, but his poetic dramas have been paid less attention. This paper aims to shed light on the method Yeats used in writing poetic dramas. Keywords: William Butler Yeats, Abbey theatre, poetic drama, plays 1. Introduction Drama has drawn the attention of literary critics, actors, and great number of those concerned with the theory and practice of dramatic composition. It stimulates the awareness of people and of those concerned with its production. Poetic drama services itself through verse (Dahami 2016: 1180), aiming to explore the condition of reality at a given period of time. Poetic drama has more levels of consciousness than prose drama. Poetic dramatists can operate at a higher level to influence the feelings of the audience: A great poet transforms his experiences into a work of art, so that the personal emotion is not recognizable in the form in which it appears in the drama. Apart from this unity of vision, poetic drama conveys greater depth of meaning by operating on different levels of our consciousness (Rampal 1996: 160). Human feelings can best be expressed in verse, and verse drama has the capacity to arouse the heart and liberate the soul and it inspires the creative powers of the spectators. Poetry and drama are not two separate components; they form one body. Drama is completed by verse and poetry turns to drama (Dahami 2016:1181). Eliot, in his essay “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry”, says that B.A.S., vol. XXIV, 2018 134 prose drama is merely a slight byproduct of verse drama. The human soul, in intense emotion, strives to express itself in verse. It is not for me, but for the neurologists, to discover why this is so, and why and how feeling and rhythm are related. The tendency, at any rate, of prose drama is to emphasize the ephemeral and superficial: if we want to get at the permanent and universal, we tend to express ourselves in verse (qtd. in Rampal 1996:150). The words in verse used in a poetic drama are likely to have a deeper meaning than those used in prose drama. Some prose plays are more restricted in their profundity and power of expression than verse plays, because poetry will very much enhance the expression and can provide better circumstances for the interaction of emotions. William Butler Yeats was interested in the revival of poetic drama in order to create a real place for the liberation of the theatre audience’s imagination. He used new ideas and concepts of poetic drama and its performance that immediately began to influence both his plays and lyrics. Yeats criticized the public and commercial theatre, and believed that poet-playwrights would have to find a new type of theatre to make the poetic drama succeed in the modern age. Yeats wanted to reform the theatre. He commented: We have to write or find plays that will make the theatre a place of intellectual excitement - a place where the mind goes to be liberated as it was liberated by the theatres of Greece and England and France at certain great moments of their history, and as it is liberated in Scandinavia today” (Yeats 2003: 26). 2. The Abbey Theatre Yeats, with his close friends Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, founded the Abbey Theatre, which was called at first “The Irish Literary Theatre”. Without doubt “the record of the Abbey Theatre will make a splendid page in the literary history of Ireland” (Mikhail 1988: xi). The founders worked together for the purpose of the spiritual independence of Ireland from England, although they were different in tastes and interests, especially Lady Gregory, who “saw the project as a chance to do important work for her country, while fulfilling her own ambitions. In Yeats, she saw “a talented young man who desperately needed her help” (Holdeman 2006: 37).Their purpose was to establish an Irish theatre for the Irish people with local actors and to present social problems, especially the famine, on the stage: The Abbey’s main missions remains primarily but not exclusively to produce plays by Irish playwrights on Irish themes. With its inception, ordinary people, peasant farmers, city workers, fisher folk, back- country people, itinerants, small merchants, the poor, the sick, and the blind would find a place and a voice on the Irish stage, whereas the foolish and embarrassing, shifting, hot-tempered, lazy, conniving, often 135 HUMAN, POSTHUMAN drunken, comic “stage Irishman”, speaking in a ludicrously exaggerated accent, was banished except for in historical revivals of early works. (Sternlicht 2010: 20) Yeats believed in his ability to be a dramatist; he believed that the stage had more effect on people than books. From his early life, he was attracted to drama. He believed that on the stage he would be in contact with a large audiences, so his philosophy and perspective on different issues would be received to a wider extent than if he presented them in books, which attracted smaller audiences (Holdeman 2006: 37).Yeats played a great role in the foundation of the poetic drama. He planned to put old stories into dramatic verse: I do not know what Lady Gregory or Mr. Moore thinks of these projects. I am not going to say what I think. I have spent much of my time and more of my thought these last ten years on Irish organization, and now that the Irish Literary Theatre has completed the plan I had in my head ten years ago, I want to go down again to primary ideas. I want to put old stories into verse, and if I put them into dramatic verse, it will matter less to me henceforward who plays them than what they play, and how they play. I hope to get our heroic age into verse and to solve some problems of the speaking of verse to musical notes. (Yeats 2003: 6) The requisites of the Irish Renaissance made him think more clearly about the production of drama whose positive consequences remain even after the performance. He wanted to produce drama that could to appeal to the hearts and minds of the audiences in a way that could make them understand their problems and their fate. He believed that poetic drama should be alive and effective He stated: I may say, for I am perhaps writing an epitaph, and epitaphs should be written in a genial spirit, that we have turned a great deal of Irish imagination towards the stage. We could not have done this if our movement had not opened a way of expression for an impulse that was in the people themselves. The truth is that the Irish people are at that precise stage of their history when imagination, shaped by many stirring events, desires dramatic expression. (Yeats 2003: 4) Poetic drama proved to be popular in the Abbey Theatre due to the work of Yeats and his friends, whereas prose drama, which put so much stress on the material world, was prominent in London’s theatres. It was pointed out that “Yeats developed new theories of poetic drama and its performance that quickly began to affect both his plays and lyrics” (Holdeman 2006: 46).Yeats strove throughout the large body of his varied works to make the stage a field of thrill, of sophisticated joy, intellectual rapture, a place of cultural liberation. He was confronted with big challenges when producing verse plays at a time when prose drama was popular: He was a prolific writer of plays throughout his life; only Shaw, of the major playwrights in English of his time, wrote more. His earliest writings are dramatic, B.A.S., vol. XXIV, 2018 136 from the “Arcadian play” The Island of Statues in 1885 onwards, and in the late 1880s he is already discussing with George Russell and John O’Leary the possibility of writing poetic drama. Throughout his life he described his literary achievements in terms of dramatic. (O’Donoghue 2006: 101) Yeats established his style as a tragic poet and dramatist in which he adopted the world of dreams rather than cognitive elements (cf. Armstrong 2013: 95). He believed that a tragic play is a passionate art that touches the feelings of audience in terms of terror and delight. In “Vision of Evil and Unity of Being”, Maeve claimed that: Yeats’s creation of a tragic landscape is made coherent by the response which it evokes. Aristotle defines tragedy in terms of pity and fear; Yeats defines it in terms of terror and delight, what he calls the Vision of Evil and Unity of Being. Terror and the Vision of Evil dominate in Yeats’s plays, culminating in the horror of Purgatory. In the poetry, too, terror is a frequent emotional response. (qtd. in Good 1987: 2) In Yeats’ plays, we find the symbolic representation of types and figures that derive from legend, myth and history (Taylor 1984:14). Yeats’s plays contain lyric poetry, because he believed that dramatic poetry was the best form of poetry. He was able to attract the attention of the public by emphasizing the dramatic nature of his poems that were based on his own imagination; “he said more than once, in various formulation, that the highest form of poetry was dramatic” (O’Donoghue 2006: 107). The drama is obvious in his poetry and he considered it very important and necessary to revive the poetic drama in the Irish theatre: I wanted my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung and because I did not understand my own instincts gave half a dozen wrong or secondary reasons; (…) I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to the syntax that is for ear alone.