If one reads through Eliot's letters home in the years from his marriage in 1916 to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, the most recurrent subject, beating even his and Vivien's illnesses into second place, is the state of his finances. Eliot had come from a wealthy family, and his wife and their joint ailments were expensive. He was thus particularly appreciative of the patron that Pound found for him, a rich New York lawyer with an interest in literature, John Quinn. Eliot's letters to Quinn see him as unbuttoned as his four-piece suit would allow, and it is interesting how definite Eliot is in this correspondence that The Waste Land belongs to the past. Even more striking are the terms in which he described his current project to Quinn in a letter of 26 April l923: ‘I can only say that it [Quinn's extraordinary generosity and kindness] is the greatest stimulus to me to commence the work I have in mind, which is more ambitious than anything I have ever done yet’ (WL, pp. xxviii–xxix).

This work was never finished, but Eliot insisted that the fragments be published in all subsequent editions of his poems, where they are entitled Sweeney Agonistes Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama. This in many ways marks the culmination of Eliot 's modernist experiments in an attempt to write a popular drama that would use the rhythms of the jazz age. It is a curiosity of history that St Louis produced not only America's greatest poet of the twentieth century in T. S. Eliot but also a generation later its greatest prose writer in William S. Burroughs. Burroughs's novels are populated by a cast of extraordinary characters, Dr Benway, the Impossible Kid, A.J., etc., who obviously have achieved real existence for their creator. Fresca and Mrs Porter, Eugenides and Phlebas, would seem to have had a similar reality for Eliot. His Aristophanic melodrama sees Sweeney and Doris leave the quatrains of ‘Sweeney Erect’ and mount the stage using a simple rhythmic language very far removed from the complicated metres and references of The Waste Land.