He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Fortunately, Eliot has fallen a bit out of style lately, so now’s the perfect time to pick up the poem and decide for yourself how you feel about it.Īfter the publication of "Prufrock," Eliot went on to publish some of the most important poems of the 20th century, including " The Waste Land," his best known. A lot of people still hate the poem, mostly because they had it pounded into them by overly strict teachers in school, which is the quickest way to suck the fun out of anything. They certainly have no relation to poetry…" ( Times Literary Supplement 21 June 1917, no. The "Literary Supplement" of The London Times had this to say: "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. It was considered pretty experimental at the time, and a lot of people hated it. In 1917 it was published as part of a small book called Prufrock and Other Observations. War, cities, boredom, and fear: these are all classic modernist themes.Įliot got "Prufrock" published in Poetry magazine in 1915 with the help of his buddy Ezra Pound, who was like a friendly uncle-figure to a lot of the European modernists. The poem is set in a big, dirty city, and its speaker is a very unhappy man who is afraid of living and therefore bored all the time. At that time, Britain was considered the most modern country in the world. Eliot wrote most of "Prufrock" when he was 22 years old (!), in the years before the start of World War I. Eliot, was an American who moved to Britain in 1914. Alfred Prufrock" is totally a modernist poem. In their work, they try to make sense of all these changes, which no one quite understands. The "modernists" basically include all the artists and writers who were living smack in the middle of the huge, massive transformation from olden days to modern times, which was roughly the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. Nowadays, we’re all used to living in the modern world, but it wasn’t always that way. Welcome to the modern world – but, of course, you were here already, Mr. Then, along come all these new technologies – everything from sewer systems to railroads – and suddenly lots of people are living close together in cities, and even those who aren’t living close together are able to find out what’s going on with the help of (from oldest to most recent) telegrams, newspapers, telephones, cell phones, and the internet. They didn’t travel much or interact with one another. For most of history, most people lived really far away from one another in small villages. Okay, so you might have heard of a little movement called "modernism." Nobody out there has a great definition of modernism, but here’s ours. Whoa, whoa, hold on there a sec – what’s this all about?
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