Although there have been innumerable studies of T. S. Eliot, this is the first to examine closely the changes in his dramatic practice and to relate them to his artistic and intellectual development. Professor Smith finds Eliot's dramatic theory rooted in his conception of the need for order in religion and art; she traces this concept as it evolved from the overtly religious The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral through such symbolic drawing-room plays as The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, and The Confidential Clerk, to Eliot's latest study of human and divine love in The Elder Statesman. Carol H. Smith explores Eliot's interest in the jazz rhythms of the English music hall, in the mythical method of Yeats and Joyce, and in the work of the Cambridge School of Classical Anthropology.
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