Word: sweeniad
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...SWEENIAD (66 pp.)-Myra Buttle -Sagamore...
...subtle anagram, it is 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...
...malice made Colley Cibber memorable ; in The Vision of Judgment, Byron made Southey immortal. But if the name of Victor Purcell-or Myra Buttle-is remembered in a hundred years it will be for the fact that he threw a dead cat at a living poet. Before The Sweeniad nears its inevitable conclusion ("This is the way that Sweeney ends. Not with a curse but a mutter"), the satire has fallen heavily among the bric-a-brac...
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