I have been asked from time to time, whenever I published unrhymed lyrics, how I came to designate such verse as lyric. The last time this happened was in connection with my Deutsche Satiren (German Satires). The question is justified, because even when lyrics abandon rhyme they generally have at least a fixed rhythm. Many of my recent lyric pieces show neither rhyme nor regularly fixed rhythm. The reason I call them lyric is that, although they do not have a regular rhythm, they do have rhythm—shifting, syncopated, gestural.

My first book of poems contained for the most part only songs and ballads, and the verse forms are comparatively regular. Most of them were supposed to be sung, and in the simplest fashion — I myself was the composer. Only one poem was unrhymed, and its rhythm was regular. On the other hand, nearly all the rhymed poems had irregular rhythms.

Bertolt Brecht's adatation of Scophocles' Antigone, first performed in Switzerland in 1948, presents an interesting combination of ancient and contemporary elements. In this paper I shall describe and attempt to explain the playwright's handling of his material.

For the most part, his version follows Sophocles' play, as translated into German by Friedrich Hölderlin, early in the 19th century. The parts added by Brecht are in verse, with rhythms not unlike Hölderlin's. In diction, then, there is no attempt at modern dress. Modernity appears in the changes made in the action.

In Sophocles' play, you will recall, Antigone's brother, Polynices, has enlisted aid from Argos and other cities to fight his way to the kingship of Thebes, and has died in the attempt. Creon, regent of Thebes, forbids the burial of Polynices, on the ground that he was a traitor.

Those of you who have taken any courses here in English literature—and I believe a number of you have—have surely at one time or another used, and therefore abused, that difficult word, Realism. For we all abuse it, whether we naively rub it, as Aladdin rubbed his lamp, hoping thereby to produce the jinni of Ernest Hemingway, or like grand metaphysicians toy with it by conjuring up the likes of Plato, Berkeley and Dr. Johnson. It seems to be a word made to be abused, and sometimes I think we would be better off if we did not regard it as a word at all but as a lower form of utterance, a noise perhaps, like a pig's grunt or a dog's bark, that we just have to give off with on certain literary occasions.

Bertrand et Raton, ou L'Art de Conspirer, anonymously translated in 1840 as “The School for Politicians,” was the first of the 374 plays of Augustin-Eugène Scribe (1791-1861) to arouse serious interest in the theatre. Given its première at the Théatre Français on November 14, 1833, this popular comedy of manners presented vigorous characters and a clever plot, amusingly sustained and fresh in treatment. The characters and situations, because of their animation, still awaken curiosity; the dramatic craftsmanship and comic originality of the play make it one of Scribe's masterpieces. Though his technical resourcefulness was one of the most important contributions to French drama in the nineteenth century, and though the genre of the “well-made” play (pièce bien faite), of which Scribe is the acknowledged father, has certainly “paid off” in the modern theatre, his plays, almost without exception, have been neglected.