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Overview
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an iconic modernist poem, written by the American poet T. S. Eliot in the early 1910s but not published until 1915
. Daring in its formal innovations and withering in its critique of modern existence, “Prufrock” centers an alienated and indecisive speaker who’s preoccupied with his own sexual frustration. Just as the women he desires seem to him remote, so too is the Western tradition of art and literature, which alienates him even as he admires its greatest achievements. Far from a true love song, “Prufrock” is a lament for thwarted meaning and desire.
