Word: macleish
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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PANIC, A PLAY IN VERSE-Archibald MacLeish-Houghton Mifflin...
...Elizabethan days every dramatist was a poet, every playgoer a poetry lover. But nowadays poets generally leave their Muse behind when they go to town. To most moderns, poetic drama means selfconscious, little-theatre stuff-&-nonsense. Ambitious Poet Archibald MacLeish (Conquistador), seeing no good reason for the modern notion that Poetry is by nature a bad actor, has tried his hand at a verse-play. His first attempt. Panic, took him 16 months to write.* Playgoing readers will find it an exciting experiment, will hope Author MacLeish's example may attract some others...
Bankers will not like either Author MacLeish's tone or his implications; neither will radicals. Between the Yes & No of Communism and Capitalism he preserves a catalytic neutrality. Neither McGafferty nor the angry unemployed speak for their author, who saves his thunder for the last line, shouted by the chorus: "Man's fate is a drum...
Panic is written not in blank verse which Author MacLeish believes has "all but killed the use of poetry in the theatre" but in a line of five accents falling as the sense suggests rather than as the rules of prosody require. Example...
Archibald MacLeish has contributed "A Fragment of a Chorus" from his new play "Panic" which is going to be produced in New York this week...