Written in 1867, Peer Gynt was Ibsen's last work to use verse as a medium of dramatic expression but it carries the marks of his later, prose plays in the kind of spare, dramatically eloquent dialogue which has become characteristic of twentieth-century drama. At the'same time the poetry is brilliantly appropriate to the imaginative swin's between'scandinavian oral folk traditions, the Moroccan coast, the'sahara Desert, and the absurdist images of the Cairo madhouse.