Sweeney Agonistes

Sweeney Agonistes
Written by	T. S. Eliot
Date premiered	6 May 1933
Place premiered	Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
Original language	English
Setting	London, England Doris' flat

Sweeney Agonistes by T.S. Eliot was his first attempt at writing a verse drama although he was unable to complete the piece. In 1926 and 1927 he separately published two scenes from this attempt and then collected them in 1932 in a small book under the title Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama. The scenes are frequently performed together as a one-act play.Sweeney Agonistes is currently available in print in Eliot's Collected Poems: 1909–1962 listed under his "Unfinished Poems" with the "Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama" part of the play's original title removed. The scenes are separately titled "Fragment of a Prologue" and "Fragment of an Agon."

The scholar Kinley Roby notes that Eliot started writing the scene "Fragment of A Prologue" in 1924 and wrote to his friend, the writer Arnold Bennett about his concept for the unfinished play. Bennett noted that Eliot "[wanted] to write a drama of modern life (furnished flat sort of people) in a rhythmic prose 'perhaps with centain things in it accentuated by drum-beats.'" Roby also points out that the style of the play is frequently associated with the rhythm of jazz music as well as the "rhythm of the common speech of his time." Other critics, like Marjorie Lightfoot, associated the play with "[the] conventions of music-hall comedy," and she notes that Eliot never wrote another play with the musical rhythms of Sweeney.

Sweeney, the title character, only appears in the second scene, "Fragment of an Agon." Eliot used the character of Sweeney in four poems prior to Sweeney Agonistes: "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" (1918), "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" (1918), "Sweeney Erect" (1919) and The Waste Land (1922). Although Sweeney only appears briefly or as a character sketch in the poems and never speaks, in "Fragment of an Agon" he is the main character with most of the dialogue.

The characters in "Fragment of an Prologue" consist of the female prostitutes Doris Dorrance and Dusty who are visited by Sam Wauchope, a former soldier from the Canadian Expeditionary Force, who introduces his war buddies that he has brought along: Mr. Klipstein and Mr. Krumpacker (two American businessmen) and Captain Horsfall . All of these characters, plus Sweeney, also appear in "Fragment of an Agon" which also includes the minor characters of Swarts and Snow.

The character of Doris also appears with Sweeney in the poem "Sweeney Erect" and Eliot used the name of the "Doris" character in a collection of three poems published in November 1924 in Chapbook magazine. The third of "Doris's Dream Songs" ("This is the dead land/This is the cactus land") was later incorporated into Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men".

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