T. S. ELIOT'S CONCERN WITH ESTABLISHING a defining language in his verse plays extended to the end of his career. Although Eliot wondered after writing The Cocktail Party "whether there is any poetry in the play at all," The Cocktail Party and the plays that followed reveal a continuing interest in the nuances of language, if not in the highly imaged, poetic language of the earlier plays and poetry. The verse, while becoming less dense, placed a greater reliance upon the movement of the verse line than ever before. What The Cocktail Party lost in textured poetry it gained in modulation and inflection. Eliot reaches for the right or "valid" word, the turn of thought or phrase reflected in an increasingly stylized verse. Words give the impression of being self-creating, spoken by characters in search of a more precise speech.