“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

by T. S. Eliot

THE LITERARY WORK

A dramatic monologue set during the 1910s; published in 1915.

SYNOPSIS

A middle-aged man tries to summon the courage to ask a question that might change his life, but ultimately tails to act.

Events in History at the Time of the Poem

The Poem in Focus

For More Information

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts, then went on to Harvard University in 1906. As an undergraduate, Eliot developed numerous academic interests, especially in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, English idealist philosophy, and Indian mystical philosophy. Graduating in 1910, Eliot spent a year abroad, studying literature in France and Germany before returning to Harvard to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. In 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Eliot moved to England, where he studied Greek philosophy at Merton College, Oxford. Around this time, he also began a close association with poet Ezra Pound, whose help and sponsorship eventually led to the publication of Eliot’s early work and to several reviewing, writing, and editing assignments. In 1915 Eliot married Vivien Haigh-Wood, an English writer, and the pair embarked on what was to be an often-troubled marriage. That same year marked the first publication of Eliot’s work—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was printed in Poetry magazine—as well as the beginning of what was to be a successful career as a poet, critic, and dramatist. Although more notable successes were to follow, such as the landmark publication of The Waste Land (1922), Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” remains one of his most frequently studied poems. Evocative, lyrical, and fragmented, it poignantly explores the divided self and the tragedy of inaction.

Events in History at the Time of the Poem

The unconscious mind

The enigmatic opening line of Eliot’s poem—“Let us go then, you and I”—has generated much speculation on the part of critics and biographers. Like many dramatic monologues, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” addresses an unseen listener; “Prufrock,” however, is unusual in that the listener remains not only unseen but unidentified throughout.

Eliot’s own remarks on the relations between the mysterious “you and I” have been subject to change over the years. In 1949 Eliot wrote to critic Kristian Smidt:

As for THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK anything I say now must be some-what 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 LOV SONG is merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex, whom the speaker is at that moment addressing …

(Eliot in Headings, p. 24)

In an interview in 1962, however, Eliot gave a very different explanation, saying that Prufrock was in part a man of about 40 and in part Eliot himself. Eliot also said that he was using the notion of the split personality, first studied and popularized in his youth.

While it is unclear which interpretation is closer to the truth, Eliot’s writing of “Prufrock” did coincide with major developments in behavioral science. During the late nineteenth century, the study of human behavior and human consciousness became more widespread. Experiments were conducted and observations made by a new generation of physicians and scientists, including the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), giving rise to what would become modern psychology.

The 1900s and 1910s witnessed the publication of groundbreaking works like Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Carl Jung’s The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), which further explored the workings of the human mind (see Freud’s On Dreams, also in Literature and Its Times). In the first work, Freud maintained that dreams have meaning that can be interpreted on at least two levels—a dream’s surface details (what he calls its “manifest content”) and its hidden thoughts (its “latent content”). Freud also argued that dreams had their origin in the same unconscious impulses that could, when unbalanced, result in mental illnesses, including phobias and obsessions. In the second work, Jung—a former disciple of Freud’s—advanced the theory that the mind consisted of three levels: the conscious, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The conscious, represented by the ego (a person’s conception of himself), consisted of perceptions and memories, serving as the conduit between the person and external reality. By contrast, the personal unconscious, an entity unto itself, consisted of impulses, wishes, and all experiences that had been suppressed or forgotten. Finally, the collective unconscious, located below the personal unconscious, contained—in a form accessible to the individual only indirectly (e.g., through dreams)—latent traces of all the memories inherited from past generations, including primitive ancestors.

“Split personalities.”

Scientific theories regarding so-called split or multiple personalities were less well known during the early 1900s. However, in 1911, Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler introduced the term “schizophrenia” (literally, “split mind”) to denote a condition characterized by disorganized thought processes and incoherent expressions of ideas and emotion. Schizophrenic patients also exhibited a turning inward, a splitting off from reality. Bleuler’s use of the term “split” applied to a split between the intellect and emotion rather than between personalities, although followers and laymen often failed to make that distinction.

It is not known whether Eliot was familiar with the works of Freud, Jung, or Bleuler during the period when “Prufrock” was composed. Nonetheless, lack of certainty has not deterred Eliot scholars and critics from analyzing “Prufrock” according to the tenets of modern psychology, of speculating whether the “you and I” referred to unconscious and conscious mind, respectively. A case could be made for Prufrock’s mind appearing to function on several levels, one preoccupied with the stifling social minutiae of tea parties and polite conversation, another teeming with sensual yearnings and erotic fantasies of “sea-girls wreathed with sea-weed red and brown” (Eliot, “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,” line 130).

Bostonian upper-class society

The dreamy, suggestive quality of Eliot’s poem makes the setting of “Prufrock” difficult to identify. However, several Eliot scholars have argued persuasively that the landscape of the poem—with its “sawdust

THE LOVE SONG OF THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT?

In 1915, the same year “Prufrock” was first published, Eliot met Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a dancer and aspiring poet, who was the daughter of English painter Charles Haigh-Wood. After a two-month courtship—whose brevity would probably have astounded the timid, fictional “Prufrock” —Eliot and Vivienne wed, without even informing Eliot’s own family. Critic Lyndall Gordon writes, “Eliot, silent and shy, was touched by (Vivienne’sl free manner, her lavish temperament, and her downright opinions, frank to the point of what was then thought vulgar—but still charming. … He admired her daring, her lightness, her acute sensitivity, and her gift for speech” (Gordon, p. 73). Vivienne, for her part, saw similar potential in Eliot: “He was good-looking, and shared her own quick-wittedness, [he was] a foreigner who might extricate her from the world of Edwardian respectability, and a poet for whom friends like Scofield Thayer predicted a great future” (Ackroyd, p. 63). Despite the initial attraction on both sides, the marriage was not successful, partly because of their unfamiliarity with each other’s characters, partly because of her uncertain physical and mental health. For some years Vivienne had been prone to nervous complaints, including migraine headaches and mood swings; shortly after the wedding, she suffered a nervous collapse and was prostrate for months. Eliot himself occasionally suffered from acute nervousness, a tendency aggravated by the necessity of caring for Vivienne, whose life eventually formed a pattern of illnesses, recoveries, and relapses. In 1933 Eliot left Vivienne, who was ultimately committed to a sanitorium, where she died in 1947.

dust restaurants with oyster shells” (“Prufrock,” line 7)—mirrors that of late Victorian or Edwardian Boston. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Eliot had the opportunity to experience the ways of upper-class New England society. Certainly, New England furnished the setting for many of Eliot’s early poems, including “Cousin Nancy” and “The Boston Evening Tran-script,” the latter referring to a now-defunct newspaper noted for its exhaustive coverage of prominent Bostonians’ activities and its lengthy obituaries.

Even more than British society, whose customs proper Bostonians were swift to adopt as their own, Boston society had acquired a longstanding reputation over the centuries for excessive formality, propriety, and insularity. Upper-class social life was dominated by the customs and rituals of the “First Families,” clans that rose to prominence through successful industrial enterprises or advantageous marriages during Boston’s infancy as a town. One famous Bostonian, the writer and doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes described “a man of Family” in Boston as numbering among his ancestors “[flour or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of his Majesty’s Council for the Provinces, a Governor or so, one or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later than the time of long boots with tassels” (Holmes in Amory, p. 17). Of necessity, t cream of Boston society was quite small; writer Cleveland Amory noted in 1947 that while Boston itself consisted of about 2.35 million people, Boston Society, according to the Boston Social Register, consisted of only 8,000 people (Amory, p. 12).

During the Victorian era (1837-1901), Bostonians evinced a deep interest in manners, publishing numerous books on etiquette. These books addressed a variety of concerns, ranging from how one should conduct oneself at a formal dinner party (quietly and decorously) to how a gentleman should propose to a lady (always under her own roof and never without asking her father’s permission first). By the time of Eliot’s Harvard career, however, manners—at least in terms of maintaining an openly pleasant and courteous demeanor—had become less important to Bostonians than rigid adherence to social forms and customs. Eliot himself later described Boston society as “quite uncivilized— but refined beyond the point of civilization” (Eliot in Amory, p. 229).

As stultifying as Eliot found turn-of-the-century Boston, he nonetheless drew creative inspiration from it. Literary scholar Lyndall Gordon writes, “To some extent, [Eliot] mastered Boston by understanding it; he felt aversion for it, but aversion did not mean he was immune. He took upon himself, perhaps involuntarily, the character of late nineteenth-century Boston … its rigid manners, its loss of vigour, its estrangement from so many areas of life, its painful self-consciousness” (Gordon, p. 18). Many of the aforementioned qualities associated with genteel Bostonian life can be detected in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—the sterile round of tea parties and formal calls, the brittle, artificial conversation considered proper at such social functions, and the “painful self-consciousness” of Prufrock himself who does not know how to break out of his circumscribed surroundings and declare himself to the nameless lady he desires: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” (“Prufrock,” lines 79-80).

Modernism and symbolism

The modernist movement, which dominated literature during the first half of the twentieth century, featured, among other characteristics, textual experimentation, an emphasis on subjective experience, and a radical break with traditional forms of Western culture. Modernist writers continually questioned the certainties of established institutions of religion, morality, and self-definition, often concluding that there were no ready answers or solutions to whatever problems they perceived.

Although modernism in literature gathered momentum in the years after World War I, many literary historians contend that the seeds for the movement were sown back in the 1890s. The Aesthetic movement in England, which espoused the cause of “art for art’s sake,” widened the gap between the expectations of the largely middle-class public and the aspirations of the artist, fostering a sense of alienation in the latter. This phenomenon was not exclusive to England. Aestheticism in England was an offshoot of a kindred movement in France, whose roots went back to the 1830s. Similarly English modernism was influenced in large part by a movement in France, namely by the French Symbolist Movement, which included such writers as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarme, and Jules Laforgue. Baudelaire, often regarded as the father of the Symbolist movement, based the symbolic mode of his poetry “on the ancient belief in correspondences—the doctrine that there exist inherent and systematic analogies between the human mind and the outer world, and also between the natural and the spiritual world” (Abrams, Glossary, p. 209). The writings of French Symbolists tended to be atmospheric and suggestive rather than direct and explicit. Conventional expectations about life and art, along with the ordinary society that fostered those expectations, were to be rejected by the artist in favor of a more untrammeled lifestyle and aesthetics.

The ideas formulated by the Aesthetes and Symbolists found a receptive audience in the generation that followed. Although many British poets in the years before World War I wrote in traditional lyrical modes, celebrating nature, love, and England, others poets experimented with form, imagery, and tone. The same could be said of poets in America. Eliot himself fell under the spell of the French Symbolists during his time at Harvard. After reading Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1909), he went on to acquaint himself with the works of Baudelaire and Laforgue. In later years, Eliot praised Baudelaire for revealing to him the poetic possibility of “the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis, of the possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic” (Eliot in Headings, p. 10). From Baudelaire, Eliot learned that the sort of material that he had experienced as an adolescent in an industrial city of America could be turned into poetry, that “the business of the poet was to make poetry out of the unexplored resources of the unpoetical” (Eliot in Headings, p. 10). The Symbolist influences can be readily detected in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” no less in the details of the poem’s setting—the “one-night cheap hotels” and dingy “yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes”—than in the resoundingly unpoetical name of the speaker, preoccupied with the mundane realities of his thinning hair and spindly physique (“Prufrock,” lines 6, 15).

The Poem in Focus

The plot

“The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is prefaced by a passage from Dante’s Inferno (also in Literature and Its Times). Spoken by Guido da Montefeltro, imprisoned in a flame as punishment for being a false counselor in his life, the lines can be translated as, “If I thought that my reply would be to one who would ever return to the world, this flame would stay without further movement; but since none has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I may answer you without fear of infamy” (Eliot in, Abrams Norton Anthology p. 2140 n. 2). Montefeltro will speak to Dante of his shameful life only if he can be sure that Dante will never return to earth to repeat the tale. The passage proves relevant—and prophetic—to Eliot’s fearful narrator, who likewise can only express himself in a void.

The poem itself begins as the middle-aged J. Alfred Prufrock remarks to an unseen listener, “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” (“Prufrock,” lines 1-3). This startling comparison sets the stage for an equally startling journey, as Prufrock and his unidentified companion travel through “certain half-deserted streets” towards a destination where “an overwhelming question” may be asked (lines 4, 10). Prufrock himself shies away from discussing the nature of the question: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit” (“Prufrock,” lines 11-12).

Although random details of the physical landscape through which he travels impinge on Prufrock’s consciousness, he remains preoccupied by thoughts of this visit—to a tea party where elegant women discuss art, literature, and other genteel topics. The middle-aged Prufrock feels daunted by whatever question he intends to ask. Sensual musings on women’s arms “braceleted and white and bare” and women’s perfumed dresses are continually undercut by Prufrock’s own feelings of inadequacy as a potential suitor—thin, advanced in age, and balding, despite his fine clothes and manners (“Prufrock,” line 63). Remarking with a certain self-contempt “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” Prufrock wonders how he could break out of the polite, artificial society, in which he himself has lived so long, to make a declaration to one of the ladies who is attending the party: “And should I then presume? / And how should I begin?” (“Prufrock,” lines 51, 68-69).

The poem undergoes a sudden break as Prufrock tries to frame a beginning to his question, “Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets /And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes /Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?” (“Prufrock,” lines 70-71). The question chokes to a stop, leaving Prufrock to conclude pessimistically that he “should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (“Prufrock,” lines 73-74).

An indefinite number of hours seem to have elapsed between the earlier and later sections of the poem. On resuming his monologue, Prufrock speaks of the tea party and the “overwhelming question” as events that have already taken place. Although nothing is explicit, it is implied that the evening has passed, and so has Prufrock’s opportunity to declare himself. As Prufrock muses over what did or, rather, did not take place at the party, all his insecurities resurface—fear of exposure, ridicule, aging, and even death, which Prufrock inevitably views in social terms: “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid” (“Prufrock,” lines 84-86). Prufrock’s fears of loneliness and death, however, are superseded by his fear of rejection. He wonders continually, “Would it have been worth while” to have asked that question, “If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, /And turning towards the window, should say: That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all” (“Prufrock,” lines 106, 107-110).

Defeated by his own timidity, Prufrock again deflates himself as a romantic figure—in the play of life, he is “not Prince Hamlet” but only “an attendant lord … / Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous” (“Prufrock,” lines 111, 112, 115-116). Contemplating the empty years before him, Prufrock indulges briefly in a whimsical fantasy of himself as an eccentric elderly beachcomber in white flannel trousers. But his melancholy returns as he imagines the mermaids of legend, whom he does not think will ever sing to him. Prufrock’s sensual yearnings and fantasies are destined to be fulfilled only in his imagination. The poem ends with Prufrock and his still-unidentified companion seeking so-lace in one such fantasy: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (“Prufrock,” lines 129-131).

A modern voice

Eliot’s emphasis on negativity and impersonality in his poetry has been the focus of many scholarly studies. In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot rejected the idea that the poet’s own personality should in any way impose upon the poem:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotions, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from those things.… The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.

(Eliot in, Abrams Norton Anthology pp. 2175-76)

In his early poems, Eliot often experimented with the concept of impersonality through the creation of a separate persona. This technique was common practice in the dramatic monologue, a revelatory lyric poem uttered by a speaker distinct from the poet, in a specific situation at a critical moment. In the nineteenth century, several Victorian poets had popularized the dramatic monologue through such poems as Alfred Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Like Tennyson and Browning, Eliot sets his monologue “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” during a crucial moment in the speaker’s life, allowing the speaker to reveal his true temperament and character in the course of the poem.

While Tennyson and Browning chose mythological or historical figures as their narrators, Eliot chooses a contemporary persona—a timid, middle-aged man, painfully self-conscious about his thinning hair and his emotional and physical limitations as a romantic suitor. Much of Prufrock’s personality and his journey are described in negative terms. Literary scholar Eloise Knapp Hay points out that “Prufrock summons us to go a certain way with him and then takes us nowhere” (Hay, p. 1). The visit that is to culminate in the asking of “an overwhelming question” ends in silence and a retreat, on Prufrock’s part, into romantic fantasies. Similarly, Prufrock tends to define himself mainly by what he is not—not young, not handsome, not a prophet or a prince—rather than by what he is or what he has to offer. The poem’s “last words lead to total self-effacement. The ‘crisis’ is ended when Prufrock resorts to the seashore and mythical dreams to escape his treacherous society… . in the last strophe he attains the refuge of total immersion in dream,” through which the speaker achieves a virtual self-sacrifice (Hay, pp. 19-20).

Between the 1910s and 1920s, artistic restlessness, a sense of alienation from the general public, and a cataclysmic world war all contributed to a desire on the part of poets to reinvigorate and revolutionize their craft. Eliot’s own experiments with verse, character, and tone be-came part of what would be called the modernist movement in literature. Several qualities of “Prufrock” mark it as a modern poem: its irregular free verse rhythms, its fragmentary structure (consisting of loosely connected sections), and its self-centered narrator. Some critics have even chosen to read “Prufrock” as the confessional of a “modern” man, sensitive, cultured, but incapable of action and doomed to futility.

Sources and literary context

Eliot drew from a variety of sources, both mundane and romantic, to write “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The speaker’s prosaic surname, which appears only in the poem’s title, was the name of a firm of furniture wholesalers in Eliot’s home town of St. Louis, during the 1900s. The poem itself, however, contains numerous allusions to Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Like the Dantean speaker in the poem’s epigraph, Prufrock is unwilling to tell his story to any listener who might reveal it to the world. Unlike the Shakespearean Hamlet and the biblical Lazarus, Prufrock—in his own eyes—cuts an insignificant and unromantic figure; he is neither a dashing prince nor someone resurrected from the dead.

Other influences include contemporary authors and literary movements, specifically, the French symbolist poets Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Laforgue. Likewise, Eliot’s work owes some-thing to the Imagism movement. Popular in both England and the United States, Imagism called for a poetry that abandoned conventional subjects and traditional versification in favor of freer choices of subject and metrical patterns, common speech, and sharp, clear images.

As previously discussed, Eliot also drew upon the works of the past for “Prufrock,” specifically the dramatic monologues of the Victorian poets Tennyson and Browning. One literary critic writes that “Like Tennyson and Browning, Eliot uses the dramatic monologue to explore man’s imprisonment within his own consciousness” (Christ, p. 46). There is, notes the critic, a resemblance especially between Eliot’s monologues and Tennyson’s, with certain comparative advances in the later poet’s verse.

The Modernist techniques that separate Eliot from Tennyson in fact allow him to intensify the effects that Tennyson also sought to achieve. Readers have frequently noted the vagueness in the definition of setting and audience in Tennyson’s dramatic monologues. Eliot quite brilliantly transforms what is sometimes a confusion of address in Tennyson’s poems to a deliberately manipulated dissonance that confirms the speaker’s isolation.

(Christ, p. 48)

Reviews

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” appeared first in Poetry magazine in 1915, then was published two years later in the 1917 volume Prufrock and Other Observations. The book received mixed reviews. Detractors, such as the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, complained, “Mr. Eliot’s notion of poetry … seems to be a purely analytical treatment verging some-times on the catalogue, of personal relations and environments, uninspired by any glimpse beyond them and untouched by any genuine rush of feeling” (Anonymous in Grant, p. 73). The re-viewer for Literary World was likewise unimpressed, calling Eliot “one of those clever young men who find it amusing to pull the leg of a sober reviewer” and dismissing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as “neither witty nor amusing” (Anonymous in Grant, p. 74).

Eliot had his admirers, however. In an essay of 1917, Ezra Pound defended his protege, declaring, “I should like the reader to note how complete is Mr. Eliot’s depiction of our contemporary condition. He has not confined himself to genre nor to society portraiture” (Pound in Grant, p. 76). Comparing Eliot’s dramatic monologues favorably to those of Victorian poet Robert Browning, Pound added, “Mr. Eliot’s work interests me more than that of any other poet now writing in English” (Pound in Grant, p. 77). Eliot’s contemporary and fellow poet Conrad Aiken wrote in Dial magazine, “For the two semi-narrative psychological portraits which form the greater and better part of his book, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and the ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ one can have little but praise… . Mr. Eliot writes pungently and sharply, with an eye for unexpected and vivid details” (Aiken in Grant, p. 81). The English novelist May Sinclair, writing for Little Review, predicted a great future for Eliot and singled out several poems, including “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for special praise.

Mr. Eliot … knows what he is after. Reality, stripped naked of all rhetoric, of all ornament, of all confusing and obscuring association.… Mr. Eliot is careful to present his street and his drawing-room as they are, and Prufrock’s thoughts as they are; live thoughts, kicking, running about and jumping, nervily, in a live brain.

(Sinclair in Grant, pp. 86-87)

—Pamela S. Loy

For More Information

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993.

_____. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Amory, Cleveland. The Proper Bostonians. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1947.

Bergonzi, Bernard. T. S. Eliot. New York: Macmillan Company, 1972.

Bush, Ronald. T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Christ, Carol T. Victorian and Modern Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Eliot, T. S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Grant, Michael, Ed. T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

Hay, Eloise Knapp. T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Headings, Philip R. T. S. Eliot. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

Kirk, Russell. Eliot and His Age. New York: Random House, 1972.