Poets at Play ─ An Anthology of Modernist Drama

Poets at Play: An Anthology of Modernist Drama is the first book in more than thirty years to consider the dramatic and theatrical legacy of American modernist poets, making these plays accessible to students and scholars in one volume. This critical anthology presents selected plays by American poets writing between 1916 and 1956---Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., E. E. Cummings, Marita Bonner, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound.

Tracing the influences for modern poetic drama from the inspiration of Shakespeare's theater to the modernist experiments of the early twentieth century, the "Critical Introduction" provides a historical overview for the intersections of poetry and theater in literary history, paying particular attention to production histories while also addressing the connection between verse and physical performance, representations of the sexual and racial "other," and belief in the transformative potential of poetry in the theater.

Beginning with Stevens's Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise (1916) as a dynamic introduction to the modernist transformation of poetry into performance, the collection also includes Millay's biting anti-war satire, Aria da Capo (1920) and H.D.'s Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), loosely adapted from the Euripides play. Both plays demonstrate the Greek poets' enduring legacy in modern poetic drama

Many of the novels analyzed in this study enjoyed mitigated success in France when they were first published, and are all but forgotten today Societal conditions gave female writers secondary status and repressed the expression of subversive ideas regarding young women. These novels mark the birth of French interest in the documentation and shaping of young female experience through literature. Literary portrayals of the unique space of female adolescence reveal hopes and fears concerning the future, gender relations, social institutions, and a country's place in the world.

This work will be particularly useful to scholars and students working on youth, coming-of-age novels, gender studies, cultural history, and/or French studies, but will also interest a general audience. It contributes to recent interest in adolescence by providing a pertinent cultural, historical, and literary perspective. The book covers relatively unexplored territory in French studies, but also creates links to related fields such as cultural studies, the history of women, and gender studies. A World Apart illuminates both the grounding of female adolescence in a specific historic and cultural setting and the timelessness of adolescence as a literary and social theme.

Sarah Bay-Cheng is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo/SUNY, where she teaches modern drama, avant-garde theater and film, and intermedia performance theory. She received her PhD in Theater from the University of Michigan and her AB from Wellesley College.
Barbara Cole received her PhD in English from the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo/SUNY. She is currently the Education Director for Just Buffalo Literary Center, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to arts-in-education and community initiatives.