(Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2023-03-08) Llorens Cubedo, Didac; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
T.S. Eliot’s character Sweeney appears in the collection 1920, the long poem The Waste Land, and the play Sweeney Agonistes. He embodies two opposed aspects of masculinity: a brutal, threatening side associated with gender violence and a spiritual, mystical side. Because of this polar duality, Sweeney sums up most of Eliot’s male characters, including those in his early poems (Bleistein, the “young man carbuncular”) and in his later plays (Harry in The Family Reunion, or Colby in The Confidential Clerk). The study of these characters reveals a gradual detoxing of Sweeney’s masculinity, consisting in the attenuation of his brutality and the growth of his spirituality, which conditions later male characters in accordance with Eliot’s choice of illumination and purgation.
