Prufrock and Other Observations

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is the first professionally published poem by the American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). It relates the varying thoughts of its title character in a stream of consciousness. Eliot began writing it in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of his fellow American expatriate the poet Ezra Pound. It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem chapbook entitled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the time of its publication, the poem was considered outlandish, but it is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic shift in poetry from late-19th-century Romanticism and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.

Its structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri and makes several references to the Bible and other literary works – including William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV Part II, Twelfth Night and Hamlet; the works of Andrew Marvell, a 17th-century metaphysical poet; and the 19th-century French Symbolists. Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said "to epitomize [the] frustration and impotence of the modern individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment".

Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life, and lack of spiritual progress, and is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay and an awareness of ageing and mortality, the poem has become one of the most recognised works in modern literature.

Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" between February 1910 and July or August 1911. Shortly after arriving in England to attend Merton College, Oxford, in 1914, Eliot was introduced to the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound, who instantaneously deemed Eliot "worth watching" and aided the start of his career. Pound served as the overseas editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and recommended to the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe, that Poetry should publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", extolling Eliot and stating that his work embodied a new and unique phenomenon among contemporary writers. Pound claimed that Eliot "has actually trained himself AND modernized himself on his own. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other, but never both." The poem was first published by the magazine in its June 1915 issue.