Ever since the Romantic era, when poetry began to focus increasingly on inner psychological reality, verse drama has had little theatrical success. But I've always liked some of those supposedly failed lyric plays like Prometheus Unbound and Manfred . And in the Modern period I love the verse drama of Yeats, Eliot, Jeffers, and Auden. Purgatory , Murder in the Cathedral , Medea , and The Ascent of F6 never fail to captivate me. Each play displays some aspect of its author's imagination not evident in the poetry.
New forms open up new avenues for expression.
Back in high school I had bought an LP of Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer with background music by Lou Harrison. The simple but bewitching score intensified the dream-like drama. How right Yeats had been to insist on the ritual elements of music, mime, and movement to support the poetry in his Plays for Dancers . W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had Benjamin Britten write songs and incidental music for Ascent of F6 and On the Frontier . Music and dance heighten an audience's receptivity to poetry.