Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

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1. xekulMar 2015
   T.S. Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" perfectly captures the essence of a middle-aged man's insecurities, and Eliot wrote it when he was 23.
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2. telemachosApr 2010
   What the hell. Here's my list of literature everyone should at least try (in no particular order):

   Homer: both the Iliad and Odyssey

   Sophocles: Oedipus the King (read it - far better than you might think)

   Plato: The Apology of Socrates

   Sappho's fragmentary poems (the translation by Anne Carson titled If not, winter is especially good)

   Dante: Inferno

   Shakespeare: at least one tragedy, one history, one comedy and one of the final "problem plays"

   John Donne: a bunch but if none else Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed

   Philip Larkin: he didn't write much; read the complete poems (if nothing else, look at "Born yesterday")

   T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Return of the Magi", "Hollow men"

   Ernest Hemmingway: A Clean Well-Lighted Place

   Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener

   Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent

   Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

   George Orwell: Any and all of the essays, but especially "Shooting an elephant" and "A hanging"

   Stendahl: Red and Black

   James Joyce: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

   Andre Dumas: The Three Musketeers

   Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

   Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

   I'll shut up, except to say that although I agree with some of the people on the thread that reading "great books" just because they're considered great is stupid, these books were all a joy. I remember them each pretty happily and return to a few of them now and again and just browse through for awhile. Some "great" books really are great, and if you're reading for yourself (not as a forced assignment), they're often well worth the effort (because, yes, none of them reads like a magazine article).

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3. dimalAug 2023
   It’s been a long time since I did it at school, so I think what I do with code is more “informed by” that process than a duplication of it. But one specific thing I remember was that you look at context. One example I remember from school was reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and how by describing the fog as yellow and a few other details, we could infer that the setting was almost surely London, although that’s not stated. Another fun thing was reading old literature at looking up word after word in the OED to understand what a given word meant at the time that the text was written. This was a mind-blower. All these sentences that seemed very pretty but kind of confusing suddenly became very clear when you interpolate the older meaning. And then every clue you get builds up more context that you can use to infer other aspects about setting, character, etc. So, I think there is a fair amount of inference, but it should always be logically and objectively grounded.
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4. hilbert42Jun 2023
   "It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text."

   Agreed, I didn't express what I said well. The comedies make much more sense to me now but are easily lost on 12-year-olds unless carefully introduced and explained well.

   At my school it didn't help that anything likely to titillate the minds of 12-year-old boys was expurgated from the text (our school editions were first published in the 1940s/'50s or earlier and had been used by the school for decades so the editing had a sense of prudery about it). Of course that they were censored was never mentioned by the teachers but when I was about 15 I discovered the fact by accident after using one of my father's editions for homework. Not sure of the play now but it wasn't one of the comedies (I think it was Julius C.). This 'naughty' edition was a hit when I took it to school, the kids were rightly annoyed to see large chunks of text missing from their school editions. For example, any part with bastard in it was removed, and that was just for starters.

   Had the comedies not been hacked about I'm sure they would have made more sense. Fortunately I don't think that nonsense goes on any longer.

   "They're still better in performance, where the actors and director have done the "translation"."

   Very true, every once in a while we had a troupe called The Young Shakespeare Players come to the school and perform everything from Lear to Julius Caesar to The Scottish play to the comedies and they performed them in ways that would bring out the best for school kids.

   I suppose I'm sensitive to the way Shakespeare is introduced to schools because I'm a techie whose primary interests were technical and science subjects and I was only mediocre at English and languages school, so it would have been easy for me to end up among the group that found Shakespeare a drugery and that was so for some. Their attitude was the words didn't make sense so why bother studying it (the same went for poetry, I recall some kids just giving up on Eliott's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land). Fortunately, I caught the Shakespeare bug and I'm very glad I did.

   Incidentally, we had a little textbook just called English Essays, it contained works by Addison, Steele, Bacon, Hazlitt, Lamb and so on. I just fell in love with many of these essays such as Old China, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, On a Sundial, Sir Roger de Coverley and so on—I remember them as if it were yesterday. The language is so beautiful and eloquent yet they lose nothing for being very short. They were very formative, they brought great writing in small digestible amounts to kids like me who would normally prefer to be reading say Scientific American than novels like Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which I recall I struggled to get through. I cannot understand why these wonderful essays seem to have fallen out of favor with educators.

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   Edit: Re stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. I have a reprint collection of the earliest folio editions and they are a little too Spartan for me (they're harder to follow).

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5. hilbert42Oct 2022
   "For the rest one can only say that if Mr Eliot had been pleased to write in demotic English The Waste Land might not have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists and literati, so much waste paper."

   Perhaps so, and that's essentially what many of my fellow students and I thought of the poem when we studied it at high school along with Eliot's other epic The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — although the latter was better tolerated.

   We spent months poring over The Wasteland line by line until we understood every nuance in every line (or I should say were supposed to know every nuance but I didn't). For some kids like me who were more interested in mathematics and science it was heavy going and boring.

   If asked now whether I'm glad I studied studied it I'd have to answer yes for all those reasons that come with age and experience but at the time it would have been a definite no. Still, I question whether all that time would not have been better spent on what would have been more fruitful schooling. It seems to me that the work is just too erudite and mature—with all its obscure references—for all but the best students doing English at high school (of which I was not one). Shakespeare's works were much easier and I liked studying them.

   With that background, I'd say that Guardian review perplexes me as it seems rather shallow and ill informed for a paper of its stature—for reasons that Eliot's The Wasteland is a pillar in the canon of 20th Century poetry and widely recognized as such (I would have thought the reviewer would have been more knowledgeable about Eliot's works). Whilst I know that for a fact, it surprises me that I even know why—given my reservations about the work (seems some of that classwork must have stuck).

   Incidentally, when I was learning about Eliot's works in the 1960s he was still alive and our teacher (and syllabus) stressed that he was an important modern contemporary poet and that it was essential for us to study his works.

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6. brian_cunnieMay 2020
   I remember the first time I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It spoke to me, powerfully.

   I tried The Wasteland next, but I didn't get it.

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