He may be mentally ill - he hints to the reader of dark secrets, hallucinates that his city’s polluted fog is actively oppressing him, and imagines himself beheaded like John the Baptist. We hear this and we instantly know that Prufrock has problems. When the evening is spread out against the sky His thoughts veer wildly from the warmly romantic to the coldly clinical, as in the opening lines: He knows he is eligible enough to interest a woman, but his inner thoughts and fears won’t allow him to risk a moment of sexual vulnerability, despite his raging desires. He wants to ask a woman to dance, or catch someone’s eye. This poem is his brain scan, as he wanders from room to room. He haunts tea parties and dances, feeling ridiculous and alone, and dreaming of making love to the women in the room. He never married, and in his middle age is probably either a virgin or close to it. He seems to be a type we’ve all met, an ineffectual and frightened snob, who probably listened to everything Mother and Father said as a child and then failed to grow out of this as an adult. Alfred Prufrock, a thin, middle-aged man from a notable upper-class family. Eliot’s strange poem because it captures the insanity, intensity and sheer length, width and breadth of human feelings more than any other poem I have ever read. “Prufrock” is an incredibly innovative and important poem, but that’s not why I want to write about it. Burroughs began to make the “cut-up” style famous. And, Eliot composed the poem as a cut-up, a cubist mental collage, half a century before William S. Eliot’s narrator compares himself to a bug wriggling on a pin before Franz Kafka began to dream up “Metamporphosis”. Like James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, which was published a few years later, it is an intense interior monologue, a modernist stream of consciousness. The poem is notable as a literary milestone in several ways. And the naive phrases, the crude brushstrokes of an inelegant man, start to become elegant. Except that, by the third reading or so, the music starts to creep up on you. ![]() The poetic style appears at first clumsy, intentionally malformed, and certainly unmusical. Louis, Missouri (to where the name “Prufrock” has been traced). On the surface it is an ugly little poem, a satire about a “hollow man” presumably from T. Nearly a hundred years later, it’s still puzzling and fascinating us. Five years later it was published in Poetry Magazine, and it became his first famous work. ![]() Alfred Prufrock” in 1910, when he was a 22 year old philosophy graduate student. Eliot began writing his poem “The Love Song of J. The first one mentioned (by none other than my LitKicks co-editor Jamelah) happens to be my own favorite. cummings, “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe, “When i consider how my light is spent” by John Milton, “The Purist” by Ogden Nash, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost, Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare, “As The Mist Leaves No Scar” and “The Reason I Write” by Leonard Cohen, “So I said I am Ezra” by Archie Ammons, “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams and “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” by Kenneth Koch, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” by Dylan Thomas, “In Society” by Allen Ginsberg, “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost, “13 Ways of looking at a blackbird” and “The poem that took the place of a mountain” by Wallace Stevens, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell, “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas, “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost and “Love is a Dog from Hell” by Charles Bukowski. Yeats, “Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg, “Power” by Gregory Corso, poems by Jane Kenyon, Anne Sexton, Christina Rossetti, Carl Sandburg, “Wild Swans at Coole” by Yeats, “The Drunken Boat” by Rimbaud, “Sonete Postrero” by Carlos Pellicer, “Sonnet” and “Masa” by Cesar Vallejo, “in Just-/spring” by e. Eliot, “What a Piece of Work is Man” (from “Hamlet”) by William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 by Shakespeare, “The Second Coming” by W. cummings, the entire “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman, “Herbsttag” by Rainer Maria Rilke, “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan, “Cloud” by Vladimir Mayakovsky, “The Waste-Land” by T. Eliot, “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr, “The Height of the Ridiculous” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Matthew 6:25 – 34, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” by Walt Whitman, “The City in Which I Love You” by Li-Young Lee, “Poem In October” by Dylan Thomas, “Constantly Risking Absurdity” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg, “l(a” by e.e. Last week I asked about your favorite poems, and I really enjoyed the stream of responses which included, in the order in which they were posted: “The Love Song of J.
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