Monday, September 27, 2010

Eliot

T.S. Eliot lived a very interesting life and his poetry reflects that in many different ways, from his introduction we learned that he was the most popular poet of his time and that there could have been no other poet “better equipped than any other poet to bring verse fully into the twentieth century.” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” was written while he was a teaching assistant at Harvard University, before he was awarded his traveling fellowship, I am interested in reading his other works that were written after he moved to England to see how his opinions on life had changed.
Reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” was fun and exciting at first, I didn’t really pay close attention to the words, the rhythm was the first thing to grab my attention, it was fun, sort of a sing-song rendition. Looking deeper and reading it again made me change my mind, the poem has a much deeper meaning and it requires a deeper understanding of, well life, I think. I believe that J. Alfred Prufrock is an imaginary person based off of every many Eliot met up until that time, or he could be the ideal man of that time, still he is different from what I first thought he might be.
I do appreciate how Eliot pulled other famous works into the poem starting the whole poem off with Dante’s Inferno, asking to identify oneself, could be an important aspect of Eliot’s life at the time, perhaps he did not know who he was as a person. Then he brings Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which I will admit I have not read, but the footnotes talk about time and the world, something that because Eliot was fairly young at the time he wrote this poem, he had plenty of. Then he brings in the Greek poet Hesiod with his poem about farming, still a bit confused about this one… Anyway, He also brings in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, My whole point here is to show that Eliot was intelligent and knew what he was writing about, I can’t wait to read more.

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