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The Experimental Strategies: Sweeney Agonistes Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama

Eliot wrote the unfinished drama, Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of the Aristophanic Melodrama after The Waste Land and just before his Christian conversion. He himself put the subtitle of ‘melodrama’ in it in 1932 and later published this poem under the group of “Unfinished Poems,” which proves the writer’s intricate intention and concerns for this work. In spite of his thoughtful considerations, this work has not much appealed to the public and the scholars as might be expected. This article is to discover the significance of this work as a preparatory step for Eliot’s later works. The survey of the experimental strategies of Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of the Aristophanic Melodrama has revealed an important fact that Eliot wrote this work as an experimental ground for the effective delivering of his theme to the public. For this purpose he has attempted some stylistic aids from both genres, poetry and drama, in this work. First of all, Eliot utilizes the epigraphs by introducing two representative perspectives on sin and redemption, the heathen Hellenic and the Christian, and implies the themes of his later works would focus on the latter one, that is, the spiritual exploration of Christianity. Also he adopts one of the dramatic devices, the doubleness, which is to proceed with two patterns of life in one work, the superficial daily one and the deep spiritual one, at the same time. Practically, Eliot shows the life of the 1920’s American low class in the first fragment of “A Prologue” while the next fragment of “An Agon” presents the under-pattern of the spiritual awakening through the main character, Sweeney, with the invitation of Doris to the cannibal island to convert her. To use the advantages of the poetic form, Eliot adopts musical methods such as the jazz accompaniment and the chorus, which not only make up the compressed content of the play but derive the unconscious, immediate emotional effects from the public even in the ignorance of the spiritual meaning of death and life. Eliot is also following the rules of the melodrama such as the coincidence and the delaying of the conclusion. In the work, Doris is obsessed by the idea of coincidence about her affairs and this work ends with Sweeney’s mission as a missionary unfulfilled, which should be continually pursued in Eliot’s later works.