“Euripides seems to have felt that the dignified perfection of Sophocles could be challenged only by novelty and irresponsibility. The religious conditions of the Dionysian festival kept him within certain bounds… But within the imposed limits Euripides was as profane as he dared to be, making melodrama of the divine realities which his predecessors accepted religiously, using the stage merely as a convenience for popularizing his own eccentric values.”

—  Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from "Poetic Drama", reprinted in The Common Asphodel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949)

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Laura Riding Jackson 42
poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer 1901–1991

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