From 1931 until the outbreak of war in 1939 most of Eliot's writing in verse was directed towards dramatic performance, as his preoccupation with selfperfection expanded into a concern for the perfection of society. The fruition of this development is to be found in the three wartime Quartets; and the main interest of the plays of the 1930s, if it is the poetry one is interested in, is that they enable us to follow the transition from Ash-Wednesday to Four Quartets. The plays, together with his thinking about the possibilities of poetic drama, can provide an introduction to the new kind of poetry which he wrote during the war.

The action of Eliot's plays arises from no ordinary kind of dramatic conflict, but rather from the contradiction of the sort of experience which is the usual stuff of drama by the religious vision cultivated in his poetry. This is the constant theme of his writings about poetry in the theatre. In the essay on Marston (1934), which is of great interest in relation to Burnt Norton as well as Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, he wrote: