Poets at Play: An Anthology of Modernist Drama

With Barbara Cole

Poets at Play is the first book in over thirty years to consider the dramatic and theatrical legacy of American modernist poets, making these plays accessible to students and scholars in one concise volume. This critical anthology presents selected drama by American poets writing between 1910 and 1960 – Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., E.E. Cummings, Marita Bonner, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. Rather than simply treating their plays as poetic oddities, this anthology places the drama of modernist poets squarely within theater history, including production histories and considerations of staging practices, acting styles, and performance venues. The volume opens with a critical introduction to the plays within modernism and includes detailed individual introductions for each play with further reading.