The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 108
At the foot of the last page of the poem in 1954 is an inscription by David Jones:
CVM LVCIA
ET OMNIBUS
SANCTIS TVIS
INTRA QVORVM
NOS CONSORTIVM
VENIÆ LARGITOR
A · ADMITTE · Ω
[WITH LUCY AND ALL YOUR SAINTS INTO WHOSE COMPANY ADMIT US, BESTOWER OF FORGIVENESS | IN PEACE FLOURISHING AND IN GENTLE-HANDED WHOLENESS], tr. Nicolete Gray, The Painted Inscriptions of David Jones (1981). Gray: “from the Canon of the Mass (now Eucharistic Prayer 1). The Greek is from the Orphic hymn to Persephone XXIX … St Lucy was martyred in Sicily where Persephone gathered her flowers.”
David Jones was later to create a bookplate lettered “E · LIBRIS | ELIOT | | THOMAS · STEARNS | | ESME · VALERIE”, showing the head of an elephant holding an arrow by his trunk, and encircled, in green, by an inscription which plays with beginnings and ends: “THE · CERTAINTY · OF · UNCHANGING · LOVE ·”
[Poem I 110 · Textual History II 440–47]
Unfinished Poems
Section introduced, with half-title, 1936+. (None of the poems was ever added to Sel Poems.) The contents appear in the order of first publication:
Sweeney Agonistes
Fragment of a Prologue Criterion Oct 1926
Fragment of an Agon Criterion Jan 1927
(The two collected in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes.)
Coriolan
I. Triumphal March as an Ariel Poem Oct 1931
II. Difficulties of a Statesman Commerce
Winter [1931/]1932
Sweeney Agonistes
1. An Uncompleted Work 2. Aristophanes 3. Conception
4. Jazz 5. Arnold Bennett’s Advice 6. The Superior Landlord
7. Delays and Criterion Publication of the two Fragments
8. Volume Publication 9. After Publication
10. Première in America: Enter an Old Gentleman
11. British Performances
The two Fragments were published in the Criterion without further reference to a larger design: first, Fragment of a Prologue in Oct 1926, then Fragment of an Agon in Jan 1927. (To Marguerite Caetani, 21 Aug 1926: “putting my own pseudo-dramatic verse into the Criterion means that for the next two numbers I can use so much the less of other people”.) There was no authorised American publication until 1936. However, Samuel Roth exploited US copyright law to reprint the Fragments in Two Worlds Monthly, NY, in Jan 1927 and May–June 1927 respectively (having also used part of Joyce’s Work in Progress and a story by D. H. Lawrence from previous issues of the Criterion: see Spoo 88). The second Fragment was legitimately reprinted in Profile: Ezra Pound: An Anthology Collected in MCMXXXI (Milan, 1932).
In a letter to Charles Williams, 2 Apr 1929, TSE referred to “the two fragments of Sweeney Agonistes (published in the Criterion)”, and the full title Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama was used for the volume published in Dec 1932, and in 1936+. Sweeney Agonistes was reprinted in From the Modern Repertoire: Series One ed. Eric Bentley (U. Denver, 1949). It was performed, with “an unpublished last scene” (see 10. PREMIÈRE IN AMERICA: ENTER AN OLD GENTLEMAN), as part of Homage to T. S. Eliot: A Programme of Poetry Drama and Music on 13 June 1965, at the Globe Theatre, Blackfriars Road; the music was by John Dankworth and the “settings” were by Bridget Riley. In 1969 Riley proposed to Faber a limited edition version of no more than 75 portfolios, and Charles Monteith suggested that it should include “that final short scene which doesn’t appear in the Collected Poems” (Faber archive). No such portfolios were produced.
[Poems I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
No recording by TSE of Fragment of a Prologue is known. He recorded Fragment of an Agon (in two parts) in May 1947 for the Harvard Poetry Room; released by Harvard Vocarium Records, 1948.
On 27 Jan 1947 the BBC Third Programme broadcast “Robert Beatty and Margaret Leighton in Sweeney Agonistes. Produced by Patric Dickinson” (Radio Times).
1. AN UNCOMPLETED WORK
Fragments. James Macpherson: Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760). A. E. Housman, Fragment of a Greek Tragedy (a comic poem). TSE to R. J. G. Johnson, 1 Apr 1935: “You must remember that Sweeney Agonistes really is a fragment from my point of view, and that my intention was a full length play on an Aristophanic model. The present fragments would have looked very different in a complete text from what they appear to be in isolation; and they are consequently, even after ten years’ interval, still a different thing in my mind from what they can be in the mind of any producer. In order to be produced at all, in fact, with any effect, the fragments have to be interpreted differently from my original meaning · · · I think it is worth making the point that a fragment like this is a very different matter for the producer than a complete play.” When the text was reprinted in the revised edition of Twenty-four One-Act Plays ed. John Hampden (1954), TSE added a note: “The author wishes to point out that Sweeney Agonistes is not a one-act play and was never designed as such. It consists of two fragments. But as the author has abandoned any intention of completing them, these two fragmentary scenes have frequently been produced as a one-act play.”
Unger (1961) 28: “Sweeney Agonistes is not actually an ‘unfinished’ work. Each part and the two parts together are deliberate ironical parodies of surviving fragments of classical texts, and thus the fragmentariness is a justifiable aspect of the finished product.” Although TSE’s comments show this to have been wrong, he acknowledged something of their heritage in a letter to Mary C. Petrella, 7 Nov 1957: “The Sweeney fragments were written in 1924 although not published in book form until 1932. They are, therefore, in a sense, pre-Christian fragments.” (For Fragments of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, see note on the epigraphs to Four Quartets. TSE was received into the Church of England in 1927.)
TSE was almost certainly referring to Sweeney Agonistes when he wrote to E. McKnight Kauffer on 15 Dec 1929 that some of the illustrations Kauffer had done for Robinson Crusoe “have a quality which reminds me of Chirico, and which remind me that it is my duty to finish the play, so that the world may have the benefit of your scenery for it.” To Kauffer, 6 Jan 1930: “I am afraid that my play is still no further forward than those two fragments published in the Criterion.” To Hallie Flanagan, the first director of the Fragments, 9 Feb 1934: “I cannot tell you when or whether there will be more of Sweeney.” To A. L. Rowse, 13 June 1934, of The Rock: “Except for the abortive Sweeney Agonistes it is my first complete attempt on a major scale”.
In 1936 and 1963, Sweeney Agonistes appeared within “Unfinished Poems”, along with Coriolan. Of books unfinished by writer or reader: to Desmond MacCarthy, 14 Nov 1947: “The answer about Finnegans Wake is certainly NO, I have not read it. (It is also true that I have never read the whole of Rabelais, or of The Faery Queen, or The Excursion; and I am not sure that I have even read all of the Canterbury Tales; and I certainly do not know the later poems of Browning as you do).”
[Poem I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
2. ARISTOPHANES
During the correspondence about the final shape of The Waste Land, Pound and TSE discussed Aristophanes, apparently as an inspiration for new work. Pound to TSE, [28? Jan] 1922: “Aristophanes probably depressing, and the native negro phoque [folk] melodies of Dixee more calculated to lift the ball-encumbered phallus of man” (see headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION). TSE to Pound, 3 Sept 1923: “have mapt out Aristophanic comedy, but must devote study to phallic songs, also agons.” (This was immediately followed in the letter by “King Bolo’s big black basstart queen”; see “Improper Rhymes”.) The term “phallic songs” is used in S. H. Butcher’s tr. of Aristotle’s Poetics (3rd ed., rev., 1902) 3.3.
The alternative title on TSE’s trial leaf is “HOMAGE TO ARISTOPHANES: A FRAGMENT”. Jacob Isaacs recalling TSE’s love of music hall: “Mr. Eliot had written his first dramatic piece, Sweeney Agonistes · · · He had had his Comic Purgation · · · Whether this pur
gation came directly from Aristophanes or indirectly from Ernie Lotinga, who is not only bawdy but a direct descendant of the phallic comedy of Greece and Rome, I do not know. This I do know, that if I have done nothing else for literature, I did at least take Mr. Eliot to see Mr. Ernie Lotinga at the Islington Empire”, An Assessment of Twentieth-Century Literature (1951) 147. For The Rock as a “revue”, see letter to the Spectator, 1 June 1934, in headnote to Choruses from “The Rock”, 7. AFTERWARDS. After a performance of Beyond the Fringe (1961), TSE wrote in his programme “An amazingly vigorous quartet of young men: their show well produced and fast moving, a mixture of brilliance, juvenility and bad taste · · · Still, it is pleasant to see this type of entertainment so successful” (Alan Bennett, LRB 3 Jan 2013).
Carol H. Smith: “Eliot gives abundant evidence throughout his essays of having noted closely the work of another group of Frazer’s followers, the Cambridge School of Classical Anthropology”, Smith 1963 43. Among the “fixed forms” of Greek tragedy summarised in 1912 by Gilbert Murray was first “An Agon or Contest, the Year against its Enemy, Light against Darkness, Summer against Winter”. OED adds Francis Macdonald Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914, dedicated to Murray). TSE had previously written The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret” in the March Hare Notebook.
Although TSE cited Cornford in his seminar paper The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual (1913), he appears not to have bought The Origin of Attic Comedy until after writing The Waste Land, for his copy contains advertisements for the publisher’s list for Autumn 1922 and therefore cannot have been bought earlier than that summer. (His attention may have been drawn to it by From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston, who quotes Cornford several times and takes from him one of her two title-page epigraphs.) TSE wrote to his mother [mid-Oct? 1923], that he wanted “to work in a desultory way on preparations for my play, which involves studying Aristophanes and learning all I can about the Greek theatre”. Both Murray and Cornford are cited in The Beating of a Drum (1923), in Nation & Athenæum 6 Oct.
[Poems I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
Cornford’s ch. IV, “Some Types of Dramatic Fertility Ritual”, begins with Frazer’s The Golden Bough (and also mentions Xenophon’s Anabasis). Cornford explains “the Parabasis of the Chorus—a long passage which cuts the play in two about half way through its course and completely suspends the action. It is delivered by the Chorus and its Leaders, and it normally opens with a farewell to the actors, who leave the stage clear till it is over, and then return to carry on the business of the piece to the end. The Chorus, meanwhile, turn their backs on the scene of action and advance across the orchestra to address the audience directly—the movement from which the Parabasis takes its name. The action of the play is thus divided into two parts. Of these two parts, the first normally consists of the Prologue, or exposition scenes; the Entrance of the Chorus (Parados); and what is now generally called the Agon, a fierce ‘contest’ between the representatives of two parties or principles, which are in effect the hero and villain of the whole piece.”
Chapter V describes Attic comedy in terms closely followed by TSE in the Synopsis to The Superior Landlord (this headnote, 6. THE SUPERIOR LANDLORD); the nature of the Agon: “The Agon, which, together with the scenes leading up to it, normally occupies the first half of the play between Parados and Parabasis, stands in a fixed relation to the concluding marriage, in that the bridegroom in that marriage is usually the victor in the Agon. Here, however, the resemblance [to modern comedies] ends. For, in the Comedy of Aristophanes, as we have seen, there is no romantic plot, no complication of intrigue to be straightened out in a dénouement, no pair of lovers separated and reunited by turns of fortune. The contest, the Agon, is not with a favoured rival for the hand of the bride; nor are its dangers and difficulties occasioned by the morose old father who exists in later Comedy to see that the course of true love shall not run smooth. On the contrary, the hero is often himself a morose old father, and the Agon turns, not upon his love affairs, but upon his political and social views. The normal plan is that the action of the play should begin with a quarrel or fight, which leads as quickly as possible to the Agon proper. This is not, as in the romantic plot, a whole train of action with well-laid schemes and counter-machinations prolonged to a dénouement. It is more like a sort of trial, with a strict rule of procedure. The hero, who has been attacked and even threatened with death, is put upon his defence. He makes out his case and turns the tables upon his accuser. The debate lasts for, perhaps, two hundred lines, during which the action does not advance. Then, in the second half of the play, after the Parabasis, we are shown the hero enjoying the fruits of his victory · · · Three, or sometimes four rôles are involved in the Agon: never more than four. First there are the two Adversaries (as we shall call them). For the sake of convenience, we shall distinguish them as the ‘Agonist’ and the ‘Antagonist.’ The Agonist is the hero, who is attacked, is put on his defence, and comes off victorious. The Antagonist is the villain, who is in the stronger position at first, but is worsted and beaten from the field. Besides these there is the Chorus, whose Leader directs the trial and sometimes pronounces the verdict; the rest of the Chorus sing their Ode and Antode at the proper moment. Finally, there is in some cases a minor character, a friend or companion of the Agonist, who plays the part of Buffoon, interjecting remarks and anecdotes, naïve, humorous, or obscene, aside to the audience.”
TSE to Harry Crosby, 26 Oct 1927: “As for ‘agon’, you will find a full discussion of the word in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. I use the word in accordance with an analysis of F. M. Cornford in his very interesting book on the origins of Greek comedy.” On Middleton’s A Game at Chesse: “Swinburne called it ‘complete and exquisite,’ and ‘the only work of English poetry which may properly be called Aristophanic.’ We must take ‘Aristophanic,’ of course, in a Swinburnian sense; but even so this is high and deserved praise”, A Game at Chesse (1930).
[Poem I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
Among TSE’s copies of Aristophanes were the Greek texts Aristophanis Comoediae ed. Augustus Meineke (Tauchnitz, 1840, vol II), signed by TSE and dated 1909 (Pierpont Morgan), and Aristophanis Comoediae ed. Immanuel Bekker 5 vols (1829), which is included among TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934). The front endpapers of his schoolboy copy of The Acharnians bear his notes, ending: “Was a conservative, admirer of Aeschylus, opponent of demagogues who followed Pericles. Cleon had Aristophanes whipped by ruffians. Arist. opposed Sophists and Euripides. Clouds (423) took off Socrates · · · Acharnians (425), Knights (424), Clouds (423), Wasps (422), Peace (421), Birds (414) are earliest examples of European comedy, are full of attacks on his time. Arist. never held public office, never offered any suggestions for betterment of Athenian polity. After Peace of Nicias he became altered. Radical democracy run out. Reaction, new laws restrained mention of public characters in plays. Frogs (405) was last great play. Plutus (388) was forerunner of modern drama of popular manners.”
Richard Aldington on Laurent Tailhade, Egoist 1 Oct 1915: “He may elect Aristophanes as his master—his great book is called Poèmes Aristophanesques—but his true kin is Catullus and Martial.” Under the aegis of the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, Tailhade had ridiculed the political and military élites of France in the wake of the Dreyfus affair (see note to Mr. Apollinax 6–7 and headnote to Cousin Nancy). TSE to the Dean of Chichester, 10 Jan 1935: “I simply can’t see a Church pageant about Peace making any impression · · · The only possibility that I can envisage for handling the subject at all is in the form of Aristophanic farce, which certainly could not be produced under official auspices and which would probably be too libellous to be produced at all. But what use is there in dealing with the subject unless one can deal frankly and freely with the whole swindle?”
[Poems I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
3. CONCEPTION
Virginia Woolf, Diary 20 Sept
1920: “He wants to write a verse play in which the 4 characters of Sweeny act the parts. A personal upheaval of some kind came after Prufrock, & turned him aside from his inclination—to develop in the manner of Henry James. Now he wants to describe externals.” Grover Smith takes Woolf’s first sentence to refer not, for instance, to the four characters from Sweeney Among the Nightingales (which had been included in the Hogarth Press Poems of the previous year), but to four constituents of the personality of Sweeney. He relates TSE’s enterprise to Happy Families, Aldous Huxley’s closet drama about seduction, published in Feb 1920 in Limbo: Six Stories and a Play: “Huxley’s mischievous and often hilarious scene pairs up two sets of personages, one set being male, the other female, each consisting of four subordinate elements of a single personality. With exact differentiation between the sexes as to traits, the four in each set consist of a Freudian Superego, Ego and Id, and a ventriloquist’s dummy for exchanges of sex-neutral small-talk” (Grover Smith 1998). Such ideas, he suggests, helped to evolve the Tiresias figure, and “it was in The Waste Land that Eliot exhausted the attractions of the device” (Grover Smith 1983 102). Again: “Sweeney Agonistes, still in the future, was not to mature the plan portended by Mrs. Woolf’s words”; and on parallels between Huxley’s play and Sweeney Agonistes: “The minstrel personage Bones relates to a character in Happy Families who clicks percussion bones. The tropic isle of the songs faintly recalls Huxley’s setting for his play, a conservatory of exotic plant species of erotic scent or cannibal reputation, described in fantastic travesty. The subtle distribution of the four sets of characters in Sweeney Agonistes into card suits replicates the card-pack origin of Happy Families” (Grover Smith 1998). (For Huxley’s own debt in Happy Families to TSE’s previous poems, see note to The Waste Land [I] 112–113, 126 and McCue 2013b.) Huxley published another play at Easter 1920, in Coterie, entitled Permutations Among the Nightingales. TSE was embarrassed in May 1937 when John Hayward sent him a bookseller’s catalogue entry offering one of only 50 or so copies of Huxley’s Jonah (1917), inscribed to TSE at Christmas 1917, for not only had TSE disposed of it, but its pages had not been cut open. TSE’s annotated copy of Huxley’s The Defeat of Youth (1918) is at Colgate U. TSE: “The way to deal with Huxley is exactly to sneer at him, and for this purpose there is, I think, a chance for a good pamphlet by some real ruffian—not a gentleman, and preferably not even an Etonian, but, let us say, one who has plumbed life to the very dregs of Carlton House Terrace · · · in short, I can think of no one except Wyndham Lewis or myself”, “Aldous Huxley and the Christian Religion” by Roger Lloyd, reader’s report (1931).