Word: apeneck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...signed Myra Buttle; it represents the rebuttal to Eliot of a waspish and clever Cambridge lecturer in Far Eastern history named Victor Purcell (possibly, the publishers heavily hint, he had some distinguished anti-Eliot collaborators, including Robert Graves and C. Day Lewis). In Britain The Sweeniad-titled for Apeneck Sweeney, Eliot's loathed modern subman-has already provoked tempests in all the best literary teapots. "Bravo!" cried Graham Greene. "A delight," said Bertrand Russell (who was once more or less described by Poet Eliot as an "irresponsible foetus...
...other Messrs. Eliot, was the increasingly cynical young man who wrote verse as polished and as sharp as a Guardsman's sword. He created a gallery of unforgettable characters: Mr. Apollinax, the faun-like, fragile embodiment of the dry intellect (whose "laughter tinkled among the teacups"); Apeneck Sweeney, the dumb incarnation of a brutal age; Grishkin, the musky, eternally feline feminine...
More & more clearly, Eliot saw and recorded the crumbling of European civilization; more & more sharply, his verse photographed the human ruins-an old man waiting for death in a rented house; a tuberculous courtesan calling for lights in decaying Venice; Apeneck Sweeney at an all-night party where, in a soaring descant above the all-erasing vulgarity, "The nightingales are singing near/The Convent of the Sacred Heart...