>>7985580
Who the fuck are you quoting?

>>7985580

I'm shit at poetry but found Prufrock totally accessible.

>>7985615
I can either take it for its face value projection of a creative introvert's (borderline autist's) take on the world and social conventions (with of course the quintessential 'I'm a good poet look at me' crap grinded into this exalted nihilist mortar). Or a means to which Eliot soon found amusement as the masses rushed to decode just why the fuck he put an extract from Dante's Inferno in his poem. Touche smeliot

T. Eliot backwards is Toilet. Coincidence?

>>7985687
TS Eliot backwards is Toilest. He worked really hard but he just couldn't write.

>>7985751
>He worked really hard but he just couldn't write.

LEL

t. "I really like those old Swinburne poems and Eliot ruined my pretty rhymes :("

>>7985580
I found Prufrock a lot easier to pin down when I read a couple of his essays and a few chapters of his biography, though you can get the gist from just reading it. It's a very self-conscious and intentionally Laforgueian poem written by a young man who feels uncomfortable in social situations and who thinks not only that ideas-as-such are worthless but that people necessarily cannot communicate their feelings and experiences to one another. It is skeptical and ironic and so on. In outline, it is a man (don't let anyone tell you that it's not Eliot himself, because it almost certainly is) deliberating with himself about what to say and what to do, in general. I'd say that it's full of what the existentialists call angst.

There are some nuances that are perhaps not obvious (but that's a good feature of all poems, not just the obscure ones). On re-reading it now I notice, for example, that this may be not a parallel repetition (though of course it is intended to look like a repetition) but an antithesis:

"At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool."

It might not be as I say. But perhaps Eliot is making an intentional distinction between being merely ridiculous and being (heroically) the Fool. It is no small thing to be one of Shakespeare's Fools.

Anyway it's a good poem if not a great one. All his other major poems (The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash-Wednesday, Four Quartets) are better imo

I think too many people turn up their noses at Eliot because they don't like his 'legacy' or his fans. I don't think he can be held wholly responsible for the poetry or attitudes that came after him.

>>7986999
>Anyway it's a good poem if not a great one. All his other major poems (The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash-Wednesday, Four Quartets) are better imo

I'm not so sure Ash Wednesday even comes close to the others. It hasn't the nuanced craft of other Eliot and feels too much like a confession than a good poem.

Four Quartets is such a mixed bag. Burnt Norton is fantastic and incredibly unique. Entirely Eliot at his highest hour, along with the Wasteland. I like it better than the Wasteland, but that's personal taste.

The other three are so far removed from that greatness. Especially Dry Salvages. Has that icky personal feel from Ash Wednesday.

>
I think too many people turn up their noses at Eliot because they don't like his 'legacy' or his fans. I don't think he can be held wholly responsible for the poetry or attitudes that came after him.

I think most people getting into poetry for real hate him for a while. Especially when they see all the rhetorical nuance of the better Victorians, the metaphysicals, etc. He's loved by those who don't read any poetry, hated by those who read some, and respected by those who read a lot. At least as far as I've seen. I hated him for a while and I put him in the top 10 of mine now. For a while he the one literary figure I most despised.

but I still kinda prefer Pound between the two, so much variety and chinky shit

>>7985580
>literally wtf is The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock anyway?
I believe it is a poem.

I don't even like Eliot but that's a pretty good poem

>>7987036
>I'm not so sure Ash Wednesday even comes close to the others

I know this is a common opinion, but I really think it's wrong