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Sweeney is a baffling person. He runs in and out poems like a naughty boy; scarcely offers an explanation of his conduct; and generally confounds critics by his bad manners and rude behaviour.
- T. H. Thompson (161)
Names are critically important in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The brilliant choice of J. Alfred Prüf rock characterizes the protagonist of Eliot's great early poem in a single indelible stroke, while names such as Grishkin, Mr. Apollinax, and Rachel née Rabinovitch are likewise famously memorable. Many readers have found similarly suggestive the name of Sweeney, the main character in three of the quatrain poems and the Sweeney Agonistes fragments as well as a bit player in The Waste Land, but there has been little consensus as to what the name might actually suggest. Some have heard in it a resemblance to swine, others to swans. ' Most agree that the name denotes an Irishman, but what it connotes appears to range widely, from a stereotypically drunken Irish-Catholic brute to an appealingly unsophisticated "natural man. " Confusion and conflict among the various interpretations of the Sweeney poems are evident in the essays collected in Kinley Roby's Critical Essays on T. S. Eliot: The Sweeney Motif, the most comprehensive treatment of the character to date.
In his introduction, Roby argues that Sweeney cannot simply be dismissed as "a decayed version of the classic hero, the modern world's disgraceful entry in the lists of mythical heroes, a man without culture, traditions, ideals, or moral vision" (1), but many of the essays in the volume go on to do precisely that. Elizabeth Drew, in a piece excerpted from her influential study T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry, argues that the central point of the qua- train poems is the juxtaposition of a "uniformly stale and unsavory" present, of which Sweeney is the prime exemplar, with "the con- tinuous reminder of times when it was not so," in the more glorious past captured in art and literature (41). Jonathan Morse asserts that "Sweeney is physically and morally repulsive," (137), while Nancy Hargrove finds in him a representation of "that element of humanity, and more specifically modern humanity, which is vulgar, physical, uneducated, and without human or spiritual values"...