Eliot's experiment with drama in Sweeney Agonistes constituted a false start. Not until 1934 did another such effort come to light, and that was so unfortunate—through no great fault of Eliot's own—that scarcely anyone could have predicted for him a successful future in theatrical writing. The Rock, it is true, is a pageant rather than a play, and largely a prose pageant at that, so that within the terms of his arrangement with the producers he had little opportunity to improve his theory of "levels."… What Eliot wrote was subjected to criticism by various kinds of expert people, with the natural result that a good deal of it is mediocre at best. Eliot cannot be censured for having missed an adequate conception of characters he did not invent; but he may barely be acquitted, on grounds of piety, of having abused his talent with such hackwork. (p. 171)
Where verse is present, as in the only scene without prose, that featuring the Chorus, the Plutocrat, and the totalitarians, Eliot's genius flourishes. In this scene, the one solely of his own invention, he diversified his style to sharpen contrasts…. Yet, despite the comparative excellence of this scene, most of The Rock causes one to regret that a certain anthologist was not right when he amusingly stated as a fact that the play did not exist and that the choruses printed in Collected Poems 1909–1935 were all that there was. Musically, whatever their dramatic deficiencies, these rank among Eliot's best poems. (pp. 173-74)
