Semiramis and Other Plays

About

Olive Tilford Dargan was a Kentucky-born poet and playwright who found a significant readership in the first decades of the twentieth century but has since largely disappeared from the canon. This collection of verse dramas, including the title piece on the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis, belongs to a tradition of literary drama written primarily for reading rather than staging — closet drama in the classical sense, deeply influenced by Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites. The writing is often beautiful and the ambitions genuinely serious; the plays reward readers looking for a lost strand of American literary culture from the Progressive era.