Mark Levine Remembers His First Encounter with 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

What was it like when you first read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? At The New York Times, Mark Levine remembers his first encounter with the epic poem in this "Letter of Recommendation" from the Times's Magazine.

My first hours with the spiky words of T.S. Eliot’s ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ are fixed in a precise location: the cluttered space of my teenage bedroom floor. It’s 1982. The light is low. The parquet tiles are coming unglued. Album covers — Talking Heads, David Bowie, the Clash — fan out around me, and an array of paperbacks sprawl among a week’s discarded clothes. I begin to read: ‘‘Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table’’ — and, with a 17-year-old’s sense of imminent upheaval, feel the stirrings of a new language in me, connected to my own language but having passed through fire. I can’t say whether the voice the poem puts in my head as it extends its opening invitation is stiffly formal, smarmy or seductive. ‘‘Spread yourself out on the floor,’’ it seems to whisper, ‘‘and prepare to be turned inside-out.’’

As I read on, the poem describes a journey in which benignly empty social rituals — sipping tea, making chitchat, standing by as your elders comment on your clothes and hairstyle — are experienced as an excruciation. Prufrock, the speaker, is ‘‘Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse,’’ and tortuously ambivalent. He endures his trials by veering into fantasy, imagining himself as a parade of persecuted figures — from an insect and a lowly crab to headless John the Baptist, Lazarus and Hamlet — and recasting his decrepit hosts as ‘‘sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown.’’ His dutiful, socialized self runs aground on the shoals of the horny, defiant, bitterly funny antihero within. ‘‘Do I dare/Disturb the universe?’’ he asks, with parodic grandiosity. Yes, I do! [...]

Continue reading at The New York Times.