![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “Make it new,” Pound’s poetic rule of thumb became the rallying cry for an age of virtually ceaseless exploration, innovation, and experimentation in both the themes and the methods of poetry writing, and it casts some light on the quality of Eliot’s achievement that Pound would famously remark that, with “Prufrock,” Eliot had made himself modern all on his own.įrom the title itself to the ominously cryptic ending, in which an anonymous “we” drowns in sea of human voices, the poetry of “The Love Song of J. However, the poem strikes readers as being as fresh and new today as it was when Pound first encountered it, because, among its many other features, “Prufrock” remains a classic example of literary modernism, a work from that period in literary history that prided itself on its capacity for never repeating the same act twice. While it would be wrong to give either Eliot or his poem too much of the credit for creating a revolution in the art of poetry writing, the fact remains that readers of today do have the advantage of hindsight, so they come to “Prufrock” as a poem whose reputation precedes it-a remarkable feat considering that the work of literature in question is not some ancient text by Homer or Aeschylus, or even a venerable classic from the time of Dante Alighieri or William Shakespeare, but was first composed less than a century ago, when its creator was barely 23. Nevertheless, for those who were avid supporters of the revolution in the arts then taking place, the publication of “Prufrock” signaled a turning point in the art of writing American poetry from which there would henceforth be no turning back. Certainly the great world did not come to a standstill to witness let alone pay homage to the event of the poem’s publication. As with any other event of great moment in its particular field, hindsight may give an unfair advantage. Alfred Prufrock was first published in Poetry magazine in 1915, thanks in large part to the good offices of another relatively young American poet, Ezra Pound. No poet in memory has ever had quite so spectacular a debut as the young T. ![]()
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