Prufrock and Other Observations

This superb anthology by T. S. Eliot features The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, as well as a selection of other works from the poet's early career.

The titular poem is steeped heavily in the Renaissance era literature with which T. S. Eliot was highly appreciative. The monologue is strongly inspired by readings of Dante Alighieri and William Shakespeare, poets whom deeply impacted Eliot during his youth and which he read meticulously. A work whose emotions include longing and regret, we hear Prufrock lament the missed opportunities and morose reflections of mortality which occupy his melancholic mind. 

For its eclectic embrace of past works in a monologue bursting with emotive depth, Prufrock was lauded as a triumphant work of the Modernist era. T. S. Eliot gained ample fame as a young literary, and would go on to author several other landmark poems throughout his life. 

Several of the other poems in this edition were previously unpublished when this edition first appeared in 1917. Prufrock itself had famously been published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1915, on the emphatic recommendation of Eliot's fellow literary Ezra Pound. Illustrative of the early style which Eliot sought to perfect, this anthology is a wonderful introduction to the poet, and a valuable reference for those familiar with his life's work.