The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

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"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...

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