The scholar Kinley Roby notes that Eliot started writing the scene "Fragment of A Prologue" in 1924 and wrote to a friend, the writer Arnold Bennett, about his concept for the unfinished play.

Bennett noted that Eliot wanted "to write a drama of modern life (furnished flat sort of people) in a rhythmic prose 'perhaps with certain things in it accentuated by drum-beats.

The characters in "Fragment of a Prologue" consist of the female prostitutes Doris Dorrance and Dusty who are visited by Sam Wauchope, a former soldier from the Canadian Expeditionary Force, who introduces his war buddies whom he has brought along: Mr. Klipstein and Mr. Krumpacker (two American businessmen) and Captain Horsfall.

It concluded their first financially successful production: a program called An Evening of Bohemian Theatre which included Picasso's Desire Trapped by the Tail, preceded by Gertrude Stein's Ladies Voices.

In "The Fragments of a Journey: The Drama in T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes," David Galef writes, "Through the play's Greek forms, religious symbolism, and jazz syncopation, critics have perceived Christian themes but more as motifs than as underlying structure: the horror of spiritual awareness amidst modern ignorance, and the trepidation of the soul at the brink of salvation.

"[11] In the essay "Sweeney and the Jazz Age," Carol H. Smith writes, "What Eliot expresses in this fragmentary play is both the agony of the saint and private anguish and rage of the man trapped in a world of demanding relationships with women.

.In Sweeney's story of violence and horror, sexual love leads to spiritual purgation, and yet this theme is by definition incommunicable to a world terrified of death and unaware of anything beyond it.