T. S. Eliot was one of the most important poets of the Modernist movement and is only secondarily remembered as a playwright. However, his work for the stage constitutes a significant part of his career from the 1930s, and he was a major figure in mid-twentieth-century attempts to reinvigorate the moribund tradition of verse drama--an attempt to reacquaint poetry and drama in ways that look back through the English Romantic period to the Renaissance theater of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nor was his interest in drama a diversion from his central preoccupations as a poet. Throughout his career Eliot was interested in the possibilities of dramatic verse and showed himself adept at both dramatic monologue and dialogue in much of his best poetry, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), "Portrait of a Lady" (1915), and The Waste Land (1922).

His essays on the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists...