Magic Lantern

Eliot was then 29 years of age and had published a number of poems, essays on philosophic topics, and reviews. Married to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, he and his wife experienced a rocky marriage, to say the least—both of them frequently ill with minor complaints, even as her psychological state grew increasingly disturbed. Eliot taught at a couple of private schools and gave evening extension lectures to adults; but his financial situation was unsettled until, in March 1917, he went to work at Lloyd’s Bank in London, in the colonial and financial department.

In the fall of the previous year, he had written to his brother Henry describing that year as “in some respects, the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive.” At about the same time, Vivienne wrote to Eliot’s mother describing (among other things) the state of her husband’s underwear: “Still thick and in fair condition .  .  . but it needs incessant darning. Darning alone takes me hours out of the week.” In the letter to his brother, Eliot had expressed worry that his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published two years previously, might be his “swan song.” Working at the bank brought some alleviation to both financial and domestic troubles; he began to write poetry again, and in August 1917, Prufrock and Other Observations was published.

It was a slim yellow pamphlet brought out by the the Egoist, a small publisher of which Ezra Pound was the leading force, and consisted of 12 poems, beginning with “Prufrock” and ending with “La Figlia Che Piange.” Pound had been instrumental in getting Harriet Monroe, editor of the American magazine Poetry, to publish “Prufrock” in 1915, after some forcible coaxing. (The “best poem I have yet had or seen from an American,” Pound insisted.) Eliot, as well, thought it by far his best poem.

In the volume he followed it with “Portrait of a Lady,” then two poems—”Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”—written earlier and under the influence of Jules Laforgue. There were a number of shorter poems, like “Morning at the Window,” “Cousin Nancy,” and “The Boston Evening Transcript” that could be thought of as illustrations of the observations of the book’s title. Distinct from the other poems in the volume, “La Figlia Che Piange” was, and would continue to be, the purest expression of lyric Eliot. In his biography of the poet, Peter Ackroyd summed up the character of these poems: “Examples of dramatic virtuosity, conceived in terms of monologue and dialogue, ‘scene’ and character.”

Yet this does little to suggest the originality—at least the oddity—of the poems taken singly and together. Evelyn Waugh’s father, Arthur, was not taken by such originality, reviewing an anthology of 1915 in which “Prufrock” and other Eliot poems had appeared. What Eliot and these young poets in their eagerness to be clever had forgotten was that “the first essence of poetry is beauty,” and that the “unmetrical, incoherent banalities” of such upstarts would eventually be corrected. Waugh concluded by alluding to a “classic custom in the family hall” in which a drunken slave was displayed by way of warning family members of the perils of unbridled self-expression. When Ezra Pound came to review Prufrock and Other Observations he mocked “a very old chap” (Arthur Waugh) for comparing the younger poets to “drunken helots,” Pound providing words that weren’t in the review.

In fact, the reviewers of the Prufrock volume were more indifferent to the poems than outraged by them, as Arthur Waugh had been. The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement found them to be “untouched by any genuine rush of feeling,” while the Literary World thought they were satiric teasings aimed at reviewers. Prufrock “was found to be neither witty nor amusing,” and Eliot was advised that “he could do finer work on traditional lines.”

“A keen eye as well as a sharp pen,” declared the New Statesman, citing the appropriateness of Observations in the title to characterize the poems. The only significant reviews, aside from Pound’s, were by the novelist May Sinclair and the American poet—and Eliot’s Harvard friend—Conrad Aiken. Aiken praised the “psychological realism” of the poems and called Eliot an “exceptionally acute technician” (details unspecified). Sinclair countered the charge of obscurity by admitting that in these poems, Eliot’s “thoughts move very rapidly and by astounding cuts,” a fine summing-up of their technique. And that was it for the early reviews of T. S. Eliot’s first book.

One hundred years later, what has survived from Prufrock and Other Observations? All the poems would be permanent in the Eliot canon; he was not—unlike, say, W. B. Yeats or W. H. Auden—to revise, much less to expunge, particular poems. With very minor exceptions, they stand in Eliot’s Collected Poems (1962) as they stood at the beginning. An uncontroversial estimate of the poems that most count in this first book would single out three: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” and “La Figlia Che Piange.”

My introduction to Eliot, in college, came by way of the subtle classroom presence of Reuben Brower, close reader extraordinaire. Brower began his classes on Eliot not with “Prufrock” but with “Portrait of a Lady,” an easier poem partly because it has a more stable narrative presence. A young man visits an older lady (in Boston, say), then goes away (to Paris?), and comes back to a changed, unsatisfactory, guilt-tinged relationship. What made the poem memorable for me was Professor Brower’s voicing aloud lines such as the following:

Brower introduced me to the pleasure of reading the lines as they might be heard (Robert Frost called it “ear-reading”), and it is those accents that remain with me even as the “content” has disappeared. Of the three poems, “Portrait” may be categorized as a monologue with analogies to Laforgue and Robert Browning. Its overall apologetic note, diffident and uncertain, would not be heard for the last time in Eliot’s work.

Eliot placed “La Figlia Che Piange” at the end of the volume for good reason: It is a beautiful instance of the lyric poet able (at least at the beginning) to catch an elusive, personal mode of feeling:

The poem goes on to complicate itself by introducing an “I” who seems to be arranging a tableau for the woman of the first stanza and her putative lover. Not the least of complicating aspects are the irregular lines of the three “stanzas”—each slightly different from the others—and the unpredictable, but quite wonderful, rhyming. In her perceptive review of the Prufrock volume, May Sinclair called “La Figlia” no less than “a unique masterpiece.”

But of course, the poem that counts most is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

It proceeds through various shifting rhythmical and emotional patterns, which project an overall eloquence of inadequacy that more than once pauses to consider itself:

“Prufrock” threw the nerves in patterns that had not been seen or heard before in English poetry. It is impossible to say just what he or it means, because impossible to hold Prufrock as a character in a dependable frame that binds together the poem’s constituent parts. One of those parts is Prufrock’s disclaimer of Shakespearean gravity and weight: No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be. When Harriet Monroe objected to this section as out of keeping with other parts of the poem, Pound wrote her that he, too, disliked it, but that it was an “early and cherished bit” that Eliot wanted to include, and would do the poem no harm. So much for the necessity of having a consistently dramatized speaker.

As noted in his review of Prufrock, Conrad Aiken called T. S. Eliot an exceptionally able “technician,” but failed to hazard any remarks about that technique. One sympathizes with Aiken’s silence on the subject, since Eliot himself was to write, in prefacing the second edition of his first book of essays, “We cannot define even the technique of verse; we cannot say at what point ‘technique’ begins or where it ends.” Thus Eliot had to content himself with defining poetry as “excellent words in excellent arrangement and excellent metre.”

A bit of a leg-pull here, surely. But the amount of words spilled about “Prufrock” in this and the preceding century suggests a never-ending effort to find adequate, or the least inadequate, words to describe it. Perhaps, for that reason, the poem, more than any other of Eliot’s, has showed its continuing life to curious readers of poetry, many of them younger ones. Along with Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” it is one of the few modern poems today’s undergraduates have read, or at least heard about.

Its final six lines are presumably about the mermaids J. Alfred Prufrock has heard singing, but their words and word-music are such as to take us beyond any reference. In Denis Don-oghue’s excellent formulation: “We are not allowed to escape from the words into another place.”

After a hundred years, “Prufrock” remains as fresh and unaccountable as it seemed to its first readers back then.

William H. Pritchard is the author, most recently, of Writing to Live: Commentaries on Literature and Music.