The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The,
poem by T.S. Eliot, first published in Poetry (June 1915) and collected in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In the form of a dramatic monologue it presents with irony and pathos the musings of an aging young man, uncertain, uneasy, and unable to commit himself to the love he desires or to life at all, a figure representative of frustrations in modern life and of the aridity of a sterile upper-class culture.