A Study Guide (New Edition) for T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide (New Edition) for T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781535867894

Book preview

17

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T. S. Eliot

1915

Introduction

T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, written between 1910 and 1911 and published in 1915, is one of the first and greatest modernist poems. Deeply involved with the poetry of the past from Homer to Dante to Robert Browning, Eliot's poem is an enigmatic text that can be read at once on several levels of meaning, from the story of an inept middle-aged man losing the nerve to make a marriage proposal at a party to a plan to destroy and re-create the very nature of poetry. First published in Poetry magazine in June 1915 and then included in the 1917 chapbook Prufrock and Other Observations, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—or Prufrock for short—was viciously attacked by reviewers who objected to the modernist movement itself. Nonetheless, it established for Eliot a stellar career that would lead to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. The poem can be found in any collected and most selected editions of Eliot's poetry.

Author Biography

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. His grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had come to St. Louis to found a Unitarian church. Eliot's father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman. His mother, née Charlotte Champe Stearns, wrote poetry and worked as a social worker. Eliot had five older siblings, the youngest of whom was eight years older than he.

Eliot attended Smith Academy, where the main subjects of study were Latin, Greek, French, German, and mathematics. Notably, a major advertiser in St. Louis at that time, selling the middle-class lifestyle of which its products were a part, was the Prufrock Litton Furniture Company. Eliot published his first poem, A Fable for Feasters, in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905. He went on to Harvard University, where he published further poems in college publications. Despite getting