The volume epigraph to Prufrock and Other Observations is from Purgatorio XXI 133–36. TSE quoted the lines in 1926 in his second Clark Lecture (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 88–89) using the words “Puote veder” which he had adopted in this epigraph in 1925 in place of “comprender”. Quoting them again in Dante (1929), he reverted to “comprender” (small slips are here corrected):
The meeting with Sordello a guisa di leon quando si posa, like a couchant lion, is no more affecting than that with the poet Statius, in Canto XXI. Statius, when he recognizes his master Virgil, stoops to clasp his feet, but Virgil answers—the lost soul speaking to the saved:
“Frate,
non far, chè tu se’ ombra, ed ombra vedi.”
Ed ei surgendo: “Or puoi la quantitate
comprender dell’amor ch’a te mi scalda,
quando dismento nostra vanitate,
trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.”
“Brother! refrain, for you are but a shadow, and a shadow is but what you see.” Then the other, rising: “Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.”
TSE’s translation differs from the Temple Classics, which reads: “‘Brother, do not, for thou art a shade, and a shade thou seest.’ And he, rising: ‘Now canst thou comprehend the measure of the love which warms me toward thee, when I forget our nothingness, and treat shades as a solid thing.’”
To Sir Herbert Grierson, 21 Sept 1949, enclosing a reprint of 1936: “you will be able to exercise your ingenuity on a number of misquotations. It is curious that the book should have been reprinted again and again for so many years without anyone commentating on the first misquotation of Dante.” This may refer to either the volume epigraph or to that of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, each of which TSE emended repeatedly (see Textual History).
[Poems I 3–28 · Textual History II 309–36]
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Published in Poetry (Chicago) June 1915, where the “Notes” on contributors introduced the new writer: “Mr. T. S. Eliot is a young American poet resident in England, who has published nothing hitherto in this country.” Printed next in Nov 1915 in Catholic Anthology 1914–1915 [ed. Pound] (Elkin Mathews). Collected by TSE in 1917+, Sesame and Penguin / Sel Poems. Pound quoted 49–61 (adding a full stop at the end of 50) and 70–72, within Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot, a review of 1917 in Egoist June 1917, perhaps slightly before the volume’s publication. S. P. B. Mais quoted 99–110 and 120–31 from Cath Anth, in his From Shakespeare to O. Henry (1917, 104–105).
Recorded 23 May 1947, Washington. Second: 1948, London; released by Harvard Vocarium Records, 1949 (a recording from TSE’s Morris Gray Poetry Reading in 1947 had been found “imperfect”, Harvard Crimson 8 Feb 1949). Third: 26–28 Sept 1955, London; released Caedmon 1955 (US), 1959 (UK). Fourth: Nov 1959, Chicago, part of a celebration of Poetry magazine.
Undated in Notebook. Dated “Cambridge, Mass., 1909/10, Paris-Munich 1911” in Isaacs’s US 1920; “Paris-Munich 1911”, with 111–19 bracketed with “Cambridge Mass 1909 or 1910?” by TSE in Hayward’s 1925; 1910 in VE’s 1951; “1911 Munich” by TSE in Morley’s US 1920. To Edward J. H. Greene, 18 Oct 1939: “it was begun at Harvard, and finished in Munich”. In reply to Kenneth Allott’s conjecture, 20 June 1935, that in the “paragraph in Prufrock ‘No I am not Hamlet etc …’ the rhythm was ‘first’ and remained unchanged but not the phrasing”, TSE wrote, 12 Nov 1935: “The page in question antedates the rest of the poem by some months.” (See volume headnote, 3. POUND’S ADVOCACY, for Pound to Harriet Monroe, 31 Jan 1915: “the paragraph about Hamlet · · · is an early and cherished bit”.)
TSE to Harriet Monroe, 27 Mar 1916, regarding her request to reprint The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in an anthology drawn from Poetry: “I am very much pleased that you want to reprint the poem; but as it has already appeared in the Catholic Anthology here, and as it will form the ballast of a very small volume in the future, I really feel that I should be making a mistake in reprinting it again in an Anthology before it appears in a book.” Again to Monroe, 7 June 1916: “It is so much longer and confessedly so much better, than anything else I have done, that I cannot afford (or so I think) to scatter my forces.”
[Poem I 5–9 · Textual History II 311–19]
John C. Pope proposed in American Literature Nov 1945 that TSE had probably read Constance Garnett’s 1914 translation of Crime and Punishment. TSE wrote to him, 8 Mar 1946:
The poem of Prufrock was conceived some time in 1910. I think that when I went to Paris in the autumn of that year I had already written several fragments which were ultimately embodied in that poem, but I cannot at this distance remember which. I think that the passage beginning “I am not Prince Hamlet”, a passage showing the influence of Laforgue, was one of these fragments which I took with me, but the poem was not completed until the summer of 1911. During the period of my stay in Paris, Dostoievsky was very much a subject of interest among literary people and it was my friend and tutor, Alain Fournier, who introduced me to this author. Under his instigation, I read Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov in the French translation during the course of the winter. These three novels made a very profound impression on me and I had read them all before Prufrock was completed, so I think you have established very conclusively the essentials of your case, and the only red herring that led you astray was that I could only have read Crime and Punishment in Mrs. Garnett’s translation!
Conrad Aiken’s statement of trying unsuccessfully to place Prufrock in London in 1914 is quite correct. This would have been the spring of 1914. I had had the poem by me, therefore, unpublished for three years. Indeed, as I remember it was only with great difficulty that Ezra Pound finally persuaded Miss Harriet Monroe to accept the poem for Poetry Chicago in 1915.
This was quoted by Pope, American Literature Jan 1947, noting that Aiken’s statement had been made in Harvard Advocate Dec 1938. Greene 42 adds to Pope’s account that TSE read Crime et Châtiment in the translation by Victor Derély (1901), “sans doute”. TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934), however, includes the English titles of the three novels (whereas many titles are given in French). TSE to Pope, 13 May 1947: “Your comparison of the French and English translations of the two passages is most interesting and indeed makes it seem very odd that Prufrock should have been written before Mrs. Garnett’s translation appeared. Professor Richards tells me, however, that there was a much earlier American translation. He believes that the name of the translator is Vizetelly” (pub. NY and London, 1886).
Other than Pound’s, perhaps the earliest critical reaction to the publication of TSE’s poetry came in a letter from Louis Untermeyer, 13 Aug 1915, to the Editor of Poetry (which did not publish it): “I confess that his Love Song is the first piece of the English language that utterly stumped me. As a post-impression, the effect was that of the Muse in a psychopathic ward—drinking the stale dregs of revolt. The other Sunday night there was a group at the house—one of those not-too-‘arts-&-crafty’ mélanges—a few poets, a lawyer, a couple of musicians and one psychoanalyst. I read it to them quite seriously—and no one · · · could keep a straight face. No one, that is, except the psychoanalyst who said, ‘An extremely interesting case. I think a lot could be done for him. It’s a muddled case of infantile repressions and inhibitions’”, Dear Editor: A History of “Poetry” in Letters, ed. Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young (2002). Untermeyer published a verse parody of Aiken and Eliot in Including Horace (1919).
Chapin, of TSE’s reading at the National Gallery, Washington, 23 May 1947: “He almost dissociated himself from this poem by speaking of it as belonging to a time and a person that no longer existed in him.”
In 1962 TSE was asked of Prufrock: “Did the person you had in mind represent the age, or is he a character from The Waste Land?” He replied: “I could not have answered that question at all whe
n I wrote Prufrock. It was partly a dramatic creation of a man of about 40 I should say, and partly an expression of feeling of my own through this dim imaginary figure”, Grantite Review (1962).
[Poem I 5–9 · Textual History II 311–19]
Title Love Song: “I once wrote a poem called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: I am convinced that it would never have been called Love Song but for a title of Kipling’s that stuck obstinately in my head, The Love Song of Har Dyal”, The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling (1959). TSE included Kipling’s poem in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941). TSE: “it is indeed a tribute to the many volumes in which such vast vulgarity, humanity and genius are displayed, that no critic has yet taken the measure of Kipling”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1936. For The Love Song of St. Sebastian (1914), see “Uncollected Poems”. J. Alfred Prufrock: in Hodgson’s 1932, which TSE inscribed on 5 Apr 1932, Ralph Hodgson wrote beneath the “J” of the title: “(Joseph) so T.S.E. told me, amused by my question—R. H.” His wife Aurelia recorded the conversation (Bryn Mawr, box 25, Notebook 7):
[Poem I 5–9 · Textual History II 311–19]
T.S.E. May 22 [1932]—(earlier)—to R. H. J. Alfred Prufrock (almost Proudfoot)—Joseph, tho he would be ashamed and suppress it. Book written 1910–11. Published 1917. Re. writers who contract for advance books: “I would never write another line if I did that”.
And again:
Prufrock was written over two years · · · R. H. asked what the “J.” stood for. He thought Joseph. J. Alfred would have felt rather ashamed of it, and suppressed it. Proudfoot was his alternative surname
In The Confidential Clerk, B. Kaghan (whose father’s name was Alfred) suppresses his name, “Barnabas”, because he doesn’t want it shortened to “Barney” (121).
During 1915–16 TSE signed himself variously “T. Stearns Eliot”, “Thomas S. Eliot” and “Thomas Stearns Eliot”. The naming of the poet proved difficult. In a review in Aug 1915 Pound wrote of “J. S. Eliot’s newest work”. Subsequently Poetry published Observations in Sept 1916 over the name “T. R. Eliot”. In 1910 his first work to be printed beyond school and university magazines, Ode (“For the hour that is left us Fair Harvard”), had been ascribed to “Thomas Stearns Elliott” by the St. Louis Republic (on such Scottish spelling variants, see headnote to The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs), and when printing his Syllabus: Victorian Literature (1917), Oxford University Press was to call him “T. G. Eliot”. In Jan 1925, the group of Three Poems in the Criterion bore the name “Thomas Eliot”.
As to conventions of naming, all five of the correspondents invented by TSE for his spoof letters in Egoist Dec 1917 had middle initials or middle names (and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock having recently been collected, the first of the invented names is “J. A. D. Spence”). See Clerihews I: “Mr Maurice B. Reckitt”. TSE to the Librarian of the London Library, 3 July 1935: “Your assistant has so long addressed me as ‘T. Steoms Eliot’ that I hesitate to introduce any change. But this designation does give me pain, as my middle name is STEARNS (or STERNE); and I should be grateful if she would in future address me simply, as I subscribe myself, as | Your obedient servant, | T. S. Eliot.” On the need for “three different names”, see note to The Naming of Cats 2, and on delicacies of address see note to Five-Finger Exercises V. Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg 1: “Mr. Eliot”. Prufrock: “Several correspondents have recently called my attention to the Prufrock-Littau Company, furniture dealers of St. Louis. I did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any recollection of having acquired the name in this way, but I think that it must be assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated” (to Stephen Stepanchev; MLN June 1951). The store—correctly “Prufrock-Litton”—placed several advertisements for “Prufrock’s” furniture in the Smith Academy Record 1899–1900 (Stayer). TSE told an audience in Chicago on 6 Nov 1959 that Prufrock was “a name he used to see on the sign of a shop in St. Louis, when he was a boy” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 29 Nov 1959). “There has been a good deal of nonsense written about the name Prufrock. Someone discovered that there had been a shop in St. Louis, Missouri, where I spent my boyhood up to the age of 16, which bore the name Prufrock. Then the question arose whether as a boy I had ever had occasion to pass down the street in which the shop was found. And someone else has discovered symbolism in the name which allied it to Touchstone! But I chose the name because it sounded to me very very prosaic. I have taken names often because they sounded to me euphonious—like Sweeney or Rabinovitch”, Grantite Review (1962).
Unadopted subtitle (Prufrock among the Women): Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s title Bianca Among the Nightingales later gave TSE his title Sweeney Among the Nightingales.
Epigraph] Inf. XXVII 61–66, Guido da Montefeltro [“If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee”]. See note to The Waste Land [II] 110. At first, the manuscript of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, in the March Hare Notebook, had no epigraph, but TSE supplied the closing lines of Purg. XXVI:
“Sovegna vos al temps de mon dolor”—
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.
[“be mindful in due time of my pain”. Then he hid him in the fire which refines them.]
These lines about Arnaut Daniel did not appear in this poem in later drafts or in print. For TSE’s returns to the passage, see note to title Ara Vos Prec in headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 7. PUBLICATION OF ARA VOS PREC.
1 Let us go then, you and I: “Let us quickly gather and go”, Circe’s Palace (variant after 14). To Kristian Smidt, 5 June 1959: “As for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock anything I say now must be somewhat conjectural, as it was written so long ago that my memory may deceive me; but I am prepared to assert that the ‘you’ in The Love Song is merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex, whom the speaker is at that moment addressing, and that it has no emotional content whatever. I shall be glad if this simplifies the problem, because I have recently seen some quite astonishing over-interpretation of this poem.”
1–2 Let us go then, you and I, | When the evening is spread out against the sky: “let us embark—| The night is anything but dark”, Goldfish II 4.
1–4 Let us go then · · · streets: George Eliot: “Let us go now · · · We will get down at the end of the street”, Daniel Deronda ch. XL, closely following “See the sky, how it is slowly fading”.
2 When the evening is spread out against the sky: “The yellow evening flung against the panes | Of dirty windows”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 2–3 (“window-panes”, 15). “when the evening · · · spread out”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [10, 13]. spread out against the sky: Job 37: 18: “Hast thou with him spread out the sky.” TSE: “His soul stretched tight across the skies”, Preludes IV 1. against the sky: Hardy: “forms there flung | Against the sky”, The Abbey Mason 204–205 (Archie Burnett, personal communication).
[Poem I 5 · Textual History II 312]
2–3 evening · · · spread out · · · sky · · · upon a table: Laforgue: “Le couchant de sang est taché | Comme un tablier de boucher; | Oh! Qui veut m’écorcher!” [The setting sun with blood is stained like a butcher’s apron; oh! who wants to skin me!] Complainte sur certains temps déplacés [Complaint on Certain Displaced Times]. W. E. Henley: “To the theatre, a cockpit | Where they stretch you on a table”, In Hospital V 3–4 (Hans Borchers, Yeats–Eliot Review Spring 1978). Among books owned by TSE in his Harvard years, Henry Eliot listed a copy of Henley’s Poems (Scribner, 1905). TSE: “We can never, I mean, wholly explain the practical world from a theoretical point of view, because this world is what it is by reason of the practical point of view and the world which we try to explain is a world spread out upon a table—simply there!” Knowledge and Experience 136. Of John Middleton Murry: “a real pleasure, an exceptional
pleasure, to have a patient like Mr. Murry extended on the operating table; we need our sharpest instruments, and steadiest nerves, if we are to do him justice”, The Poetic Drama (1920) (Childs 126). In 1950: “In talking to the matron, you are still the subject, | The centre of reality. But, stretched on the table, | You are a piece of furniture in a repair shop | For those who surround you, the masked actors; | All there is of you is your body | And the ‘you’ is withdrawn”, The Cocktail Party I i. (For “‘Prufrock’s’ furniture”, see note to poem title.)
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 32