Dramatic Poem in One Act: A Poetic Stream in a Concise Form. Ibsen – Leszczyński – Auden

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of The Warrior’s Barrow (1850) by Henrik Ibsen, Jolanta by Edward Leszczyński (1904) and The Dance of Death by Wystan Hugh Auden (1933) to find out how dramatic poem is realized in a one-act play. Ibsen’s drama was written that at a time when not only Norwegian theatre was formed, but also Norwegian identity and language. To tell the Viking’s story, Ibsen chose a form that opposed the classic Danish theatre dominant at that time. Accordingly, Ibsen’s play served political and social goals as a separate, special story about the Norwegian soul. In turn, Leszczyński’s work fits in with the modernist search for a new form of drama and theater in the world of cultural and even civilization breakthrough. The author of Jolanta, choosing Maeterlinck as his model, shows the conflict of two ways of cognition – contemplative and active, related to the philosophy of life. This conflict is compounded by the intensification of the situation in the short form and the lyrical element influencing the nature of the utterance. Auden’s play, created especially for experimental theater, directly points to form as an expression of the search for new solutions to the stagnation of classical English theater. Auden’s one-act play also took part in shaping new social patterns – in this case Marxist ones, in opposition to the power of the bourgeoisie. Both – the one-act play and the dramatic poem – appeared in the theater at the time of searching for a new formula for drama and theater. The one-act play became the site for a dramatic and theatrical experiment, focusing the most important problems and solutions. The dramatic poem introduced to this short form a generic chaos, which was the only one means to describe the new reality that was just emerging – whether political, social, or psychic and spiritual.