Eliot and Tennyson : (some facts to the dramatic technique of Murder in the cathedral)

Abstract

The failure of the plays of the great poets of the nineteenth century is usually attributed to their lack of theatrical experience. There is, of course, a second main reason for this: all the poets failed to realize that the poetic idiom of one age will not serve for vital poetic drama in another. But that is not the full explanation why Tennyson's Becket, compared with Eliot's, seems an impostor, and his play a failure, at least in twentieth-century eyes. For originally the play was a thrilling success