The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” is the quintessential Modernist poem. Quintessentially Modernist is also Eliot’s much longer and best-known poem, The Waste Land, which he published in 1922 and became famous. In The Waste Land Eliot expresses the disillusionment that people felt after the ghastly horror of World War I and laments his fragmented world, alienated state, and inability to find in his life meaning and purpose.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” isn’t all that different in theme and even technique. Please, read the poem a few times, take notes on what exactly happens in each stanza, and then write an interpretation of what Eliot is trying to say. We will welcome any interpretation you come up with, as long as you support your points with direct references to the text.
T. S. Eliot once wrote, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
