So did its allusive range and musicality, its dissected and etherized bodies. Nevertheless, Eliot’s uneasy mixture of elitism and sexual anxiety mesmerized me.
Only my life was an exact inversion of Eliot’s Brahminical privilege and Grand Touristry. You don’t have to be sexually frustrated to enjoy “Prufrock,” although I certainly was as a young high schooler when I first encountered the poem. In any case, Eliot would later refer to poetry as “relief from acute discomfort” and “escape from emotion.” That’s a stark retort (and close cousin) to the Romantic ideal of poetry as “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” It’s worth noting that the rest of his life was spent soul-numbed in a sexually void marriage with his wife, who probably regretted her hasty decision to marry a man nicknamed The Undertaker. But it’s crucial to remember that Eliot, for all of his later bullshit, always held fast to an idea of poetry as emotional release and not high-minded argumentation. “Prufrock” takes its fragmentary bodies in part from the philosophy of Henri Bergson its sense of twilight and urban meandering from Charles Dickens, James Thomson, and the French Symbolists that Eliot so loved and, of course, its epigraph, which is still one of my favorites, from Dante.
The young Eliot, like the young Joyce and Woolf, had a flair for condensing a breadth of literary, philosophical, and historical ideas into original (and legible) writing. Eliot’s sex life,” the writer Louis Menand once wrote, “Do we really want to go there? It is a sad and desolate place.” The sexual frustration, then, was as much a reflection as an invention. Russell demonstrated their sexual difference by sleeping with Eliot’s wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood. One of his professors at Harvard was the later Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, who was as sexually raptorial as the young Eliot was gloomy and reticent. (“In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.”) But Eliot, in those years, was a graduate student in philosophy, which partially explains the classicism. The poem is sexually pathetic - today we would call it “creepy,” as if Eliot was somehow unaware of this - and relies on classicism instead of psychoanalysis to unearth its weirdness. (Even Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” published five years later, is a xerox of “Prufrock.”) This makes “Prufrock” a poetic rubric both for looking back and peering ahead, which are essentially the same thing.įor Eliot, though, “Prufrock” was more an expression of upbuilding obsessions, the spontaneous (if repeatedly revised) outpouring of sexuality and emotion given to a man in his twenties. For decades, poets would recurve to Eliot’s exemplar of sexual neuroticism, indecision, psychogeography, and fashionably outmoded classicism, for not only is it a perfectly deranged poem, it is also perfectly balanced between the 19th and 20th centuries. Two years later, in 1917, the publication of the poem in the chapbook Prufrock and Other Observations would act as a wellspring for Modernist poetry. I prefer to remember the younger man who wrote “Prufrock.” It is also, as many have noted, the 50th anniversary of Eliot’s death. The poem was published five years later, when Ezra Pound, whom Eliot met and befriended as an expatriate in Europe, sent it to Poetry in Chicago, adding: “This is as good as anything I’ve ever seen.” This year, then, marks the 100 year anniversary of Prufrock’s imaginative journey into the half-deserted streets, the one-night cheap hotels, and the chambers of the sea. Alfred Prufrock” in 1910, at the age of twenty-two. Thomas Stearns Eliot began writing “The Love Song of J.
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