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"The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"
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T.S. Eliot
(1888 - 1965)
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Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born into a distinguished family in St. Louis, Missouri. He took his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Harvard in 1909 and 1910, during which time he wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." He did graduate work at Harvard, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Oxford University and then settled in London, becoming a British subject in 1917. He taught school, worked as a clerk for Lloyd’s Bank, and in 1925 joined the publishing firm of Faber and Faber. His first book was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), and in 1920 his first book of criticism, The Sacred Wood, appeared. When The Wasteland was published in 1922, it established Eliot as a foremost writer of a new kind of poetry. He founded the influential literary journal, The Criterion, in 1922 and became a director at Faber and Faber, where he introduced the work of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNiece. In 1927 he became a convert to the Anglo-Catholic wing of The Church of England and addressed spiritual themes in both his poetry Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1933) and in his play Murder in the Cathedral (1935). In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the only time a poet born in the United States has received this honor. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was published in Poetry solely as a result of the efforts of Ezra Pound, who worked zealously to advance Eliot’s career. Rather than telling a story, this poem uses a highly suggestive series of images to evoke associations from the reader that tap into deeply felt experiences.
Web Destinations
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"What the Thunder Said":
This site provides a time line of and resources for Eliot's work.
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The T. S. Eliot Page:
Visit this page devoted to Eliot's life and work.
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Time 100 Artist Profile:
See what Time magazine has to say about Eliot.
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Prufrock Annotation Links:
Visit this site for annotation links on "Prufrock."
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Prufrock Overview:
Visit Vanderbilt University's website on "Prufrock."
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