Poem

Writing and first publication[edit]
Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" between February 1910 and July or August 1911. Shortly after arriving in England to attend Merton College, Oxford, Eliot was introduced to American expatriate poet Ezra Pound, who instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and aided the start of Eliot's career. Pound served as the overseas editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and recommended to the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe, that Poetry publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", extolling that Eliot and his work embodied a new and unique phenomenon among contemporary writers. Pound claimed that Eliot "has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other, but never both."[6] The poem was first published by the magazine in its June 1915 issue.[2][7]
In November 1915 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—along with Eliot's poems "Portrait of a Lady," "The Boston Evening Transcript," "Hysteria," and "Miss Helen Slingsby"—was included in Catholic Anthology 1914–1915 edited by Ezra Pound and printed by Elkin Mathews in London.[8]:297 In June 1917 The Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, published a pamphlet entitled Prufrock and Other Observations (London), containing twelve poems by Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was the first in the volume.[1] Also Eliot was appointed assistant editor of the Egoist in June 1917.[8]:290
Prufrock's Pervigilium[edit]
According to Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon, when Eliot was writing the first drafts of Prufrock in his notebook in 1910–1911, he intentionally kept four blank pages blank in the middle section of the poem.[9] According to the notebooks, now in the collection of the New York Public Library, Eliot finished the poem that was originally published at sometime in July and August 1911—when he was 22 years old.[10] In 1912, Eliot revised the poem and included a 38-line section now...