In this episode, writer and critic Elisa Gabbert joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss T.S. Eliot's 1915 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem about aging, limitations and disillusionment written by a young poet on the threshold of a brilliant career. How do the poet's youth and the narrator's age affect the tone of the poem? What makes it such a potently memorable (but also elusive) work? Included in the episode is discussion of Eliot's essay about Marvell. Lit Century also wants to thank the T. S. Eliot Society for use of the audio recording of Eliot.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, out now from FSG Originals and Atlantic UK; The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were both named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. She writes a regular poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, the London Review of Books, A Public Space, the Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and many other venues.
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