TS Eliot REVISED

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot is indefeasibly a Modernist masterpiece. Yet how do we know it is modernist? Let me count the ways. Modernist poetry is often marked by complicated or difficult disjunctions in tone -- "J. Alfred Prufrock" which is capable of moodily swinging from the depressive lows of "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the floors of silent seas" to the manic highs of "I shall wear white flannel trousers and talk upon the beach / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each." Modernist poetry is often international in character and although in May of 1917, T.S. Eliot published Prufrock and Other Observations, his first collection of verse, in London, Eliot was not an Englishman but an American, and his poem uses Italian in the quotation from Dante that serves as epigraph...
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