Sweeney Among the Nightingales (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: T. S. Eliot
- First Published: 1918
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Mythology or myths, Sex or sexuality, Prostitution or prostitutes, Restaurants, bars, taverns, or pubs, Beauty, Rape, Women, Drinking or drunkenness, Heroes or heroism, Birds, Cowards or cowardliness
The Poem
“Sweeney Among the Nightingales” is a modernist lyric poem of forty lines, divided into ten quatrains and focusing on Sweeney, a brutish modern man in the company of disreputable women (“nightingales”) in a café (also perhaps a brothel) at night. The poem ranks with the finest of T. S. Eliot’s early poetry, as the author himself wrote to his brother, Henry, when it was later included in Poems (1919): “Some of the new poems, the Sweeney ones, especially ‘Among the Nightingales’ and ‘Burbank’ are intensely serious, and I think these two are...
[The entire page is 2191 words long]
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