The Issues of Poetic Drama

Abstract

In the history of the Slovene post-war drama, poetic drama occupies an important place, as it represents one of its central currents. Nevertheless the survey of Slovene and other treatments shows that definition of poetic drama most often combine ahistorical definitions, which follow poetic drama from the beginnings of European drama in Antiquity or from the 18th c., and historical definitions, which place the beginning of poetic drama at the turn of the 19th c. and then follow its later revivals. Based on the previous research and on the analysis of dramatic texts, the article attempts to arrive to a new, exclusively historical definition of poetic drama and to test it on Slovene and non-Slovene dramasthat by general consensus belong to this genre.