[In the following essay, Sultan argues that “Prufrock”'s success is due in part to its role as a harbinger of the modernist movement.]

“The best known English poem since the Rubaiyat”; it was called in 1959, and probably both was so and is.¹ Certainly no other one is more likely to be included in a collection of English poetry of this century; and two generations of teachers have introduced it to secondary-school seniors and college freshmen. Long before 1959 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” had achieved special canonical status.

One cause of that status was high regard for the poem itself. But I believe another was historical, and that the vantage afforded by the quarter-century since 1959 reveals “Prufrock” to be a most eloquent cultural artifact—both as harbinger of Modernism and as paleomodernist specimen. I also believe its special status persists, and a related essay, which will appear in the first T. S. Eliot Annual (London: Macmillan), will address its pertinence to the present situation in criticism. But my subject here is the advent in literary history of this particular one of T. S. Eliot's early poems.

A distinctive work of art can no more be accounted for by its historical context than a great political leader or scientist. It is act, not behavior. But the act of the young Eliot's individual talent occurred, as Taine put it, in a particular milieu, and at a “moment” when, on subsequent evidence, English poetry was ready for something new. In middle age, while discussing Ezra Pound's versification in an Introduction to a Selected Poems by his friend (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), Eliot distinguished “poets who develop technique, those who imitate technique, and those who invent technique,” then became more general:

When I say ‘invent,’ I should use inverted commas … because it is impossible. … The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad; it is, in the bad sense, ‘subjective’ with no relation to the world to which it appeals.

Originality, in other words, is by no means a simple idea in the criticism of poetry. True originality is merely development; and if it is right development it may appear in the end so inevitable that we almost come to the point of view of denying all ‘original’ virtue to the poet. He simply did the next thing. (9-10)

Eliot's understanding of originality, characteristically both shrewd and historical, indicates (as it endorses) my purpose: to describe the historical situation of “Prufrock” without making a singular creation appear “simply … the next thing” and its advent, to use his italicized word, inevitable; for that would be foolish history.

The first poem in every volume of Eliot's that included it, and his first to receive general publication, “Prufrock” also is almost the first poem he wrote “that he wished to preserve.”² By his own apparently accurate account, it “was conceived some time in 1910”; he took “several fragments which were ultimately embodied in the poem” with him from Harvard to the Sorbonne “in the autumn of that year”; and it was finished (during a visit to Munich, actually) in “the summer of 1911.”³ Hence, Eliot had written “Prufrock” three full years before he met Ezra Pound and was introduced to “Les Imagistes” and Pound's campaign to “get Milton off the back of English poetry.” At a time when Yeats had just completed the first general revision of his “high romantic” early poetry, a really remarkable event occurred. An American graduate student barely into his twenties evolved for and embodied in a poem: focus on the process itself of consciousness; a formal strategy identifying the subject with the expression of that subject; complexity and flexibility of tone; fundamental reliance on allusion (he was to call this “the mythical method” when praising Ulysses); extreme heterogeneity of materials; discontinuity of discourse; and no less distinctly Modernist cadences, setting, and theme. In Pound's words and emphasis, in the famous series of letters prodding the reluctant Harriet Monroe to print in Poetry a poem apparently too “modern” even for her, the twenty-two-year-old T. S. Eliot had “modernized himself on his own.”

Eliot's reference to “several fragments … ultimately embodied” suggests that, unlike contemporaneous poems such as “Portrait of a Lady” and just like The Waste Land a decade later, “Prufrock” as we know it emerged out of a different and not very clear initial conception; poems so strikingly new when each appeared were new to their creator also. But while the poem that was to become central in Modernism was retrieved from Pound's collaboration and modulated into The Waste Land only in its final stages, Eliot made the early “modern” artifact Pound unearthed and wisely championed entirely “on his own.”⁴ To call his achievement remarkable is not to exaggerate, but to judge historically.

Prior to Pound's eventual success with Monroe, Eliot and the few fellow-poets who knew and liked “Prufrock” had failed to place it. Harold Monro not only rejected it for Poetry and Drama but, according to Conrad Aiken, thought it “bordered on ‘insanity.’” Pound could safely predict that his friend's “individual and unusual” poem would “at once differentiate him from everyone else, in the public mind”;⁵ but public reaction to it is less significant of its historical situation than the resistance of these and other editors of that era, some of whom are now renowned for their eagerness to promote new poetry, including other poems by the young Eliot. Perhaps the primacy he always accorded “Prufrock” in his volumes was more than pride of place—it was a declaration about the historical status signified by the resistance to it of such editors, as well.

If it was, his quiet declaration that “Prufrock” began something really new is congruent not only with his description of originality, but also with the careful attributions of debt to other poets in essays he wrote in all periods of his life; for the attributions do not express ostentatious modesty any more than the declaration expresses boasting. Both things proceed from his manifest, abiding interest in precisely the relationship his own and other poetry of his time had to “tradition.” “Tradition and the Individual Talent” says of “the new” that “its fitting in is a test of its value”; and the historical relations of “Prufrock” seem to confirm that. To have achieved his harbinger and archetype “on his own” was not to have created it ex nihilo: “True originality is … development.”

The most general of those historical relations should be mentioned first. The young Eliot's instinctive Modernism in “Prufrock” exemplifies the then-new art's undeniable filiation (though the degree is much debated) to Romanticism. Such romantic imagery as “sea-girls wreathed with seaweed” is exploited in the poem, not adopted, and its affinity with the romantic quest poem is an ironic one; yet its link to the romantic motif of the melancholy of inadequacy that has caused failed aspiration is direct.⁶ Furthermore, it exemplifies the Modernists’ perpetuation of a central romantic commitment from the time of Novalis. Strindberg and Yeats, Proust and Kafka, Joyce and Pound—and the mature Eliot: all had as their principal subject the psychic experience of the writer. In Eliot's Early Years (Oxford University Press, 1977), Lyndall Gordon calls “Prufrock” one of Eliot's “less obviously autobiographical” early poems (45). Her distinction is relative (she herself proposes autobiographical elements for almost two pages); the connection between the young poet's own situation and state of mind and the predicament and consciousness of his creature is indicated by Eliot's revelation to his friend Richard Aldington a decade later that abulia was “a lifelong affliction,” the later description of him as “Prufrockian” by most friends who knew him when young, and his reported reference to Prufrock, in a lecture, as a young man.⁷ The later poem after Edward Lear beginning “How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!,” whose conversation is restricted to “If and Perhaps and But,” may be a joke; but it cannot be totally alien to his perception of himself.

If the romantic elements in “Prufrock” are as relevant to its inchoate Modernism as are those that comment on romantic imagery and attitudes, its principal more remote ancestors also are relevant. Dante is important to Modernist writers from Joyce to Akhmatova. And the affinity Modernist English poets felt for the Renaissance dramatic and lyric poetry Eliot identified as models is partly his own doing. All this is familiar. So is the kinship of the dramatic-monologue portraits by Tennyson and Browning, which (possibly excepting Browning's ironic ones) is more obvious than close. However, direct links to other near-contemporaries have little relevant historical significance: Eliot's early poems are full of traces of poets ranging from Vergil to Swinburne.

Ironically, echoes of and (in Eliot's sense) thefts from the predecessor “best known English poem” have been proposed.⁸ Other manifestations of the Rubaiyat, its translator, and his biographer in the “English Men of Letters” series (A. C. Benson), long recognized in “Gerontion,” have been expounded by recent critics.⁹ With some justice, the ending of the poem is related to Arnold's “The Forsaken Merman” and details to Stevenson's “Crabbed Age and Youth”; with less, “title from Kipling” is proclaimed (presumably, from “The Love Song of Har Dyal”).¹⁰ These detections of the young poet's use of his reading, when valid, show Eliot anticipating the aleatory method that would become so prominent in Modernist art. But the sources themselves did not help him evolve into the creator of the “individual and unusual” poem.

Much more significant of that evolution are traces of two of Conrad's stories, Heart of Darkness and “The Return,” and of Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal.¹¹ We know that within a decade Heart of Darkness had affected Eliot sufficiently to provide the epigraph for “The Hollow Men” and (originally) The Waste Land; significantly, it has had a status in this century (including its classrooms) similar to that of “Prufrock.” And “from Baudelaire,” Eliot wrote late in life,

I learned first, a precedent for the poetical possibilities, never developed by any poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis, of the possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric … that the sort of material that I had … an adolescent … in an industrial city in America, could be … the source of new poetry … ¹²

The words “possibilities” and of course “developed” are important, for he was familiar with recent treatments of “sordid aspects of the modern metropolis” by W. E. Henley, John Davidson, and James Thomson.¹³ The historical context of “Prufrock” encompasses their generally grim urban poetry; but it was by way of Baudelaire he realized “possibilities” to “develop.” The young Eliot learned “From him, as from Laforgue” that he could make “new poetry” about a world of one-night cheap hotels, soot and sewers—and have a vision of mermaids occur in his poem. Equally important, Baudelaire and on subsequent evidence Conrad (but not Laforgue or the minor British poets of the time) showed him the moving and profound art possible about what was to become a major Modernist preoccupation: the impress of urban industrial civilization on the human spirit.

The “Spleen et Idéal”; section of Les fleurs du mal has a sequence of four poems (LXXVIII-LXXXI) entitled “Spleen.” Despite the near-archaism of the word in English, Eliot published a poem with that title in The Harvard Advocate in January of his senior year, one month before he began “Prufrock.” In it the ideal of “Sunday faces,” “conscious graces” and “Evening, lights, and tea,” is splenetically subverted by “cats in the alley” and a personified Life who is “bald,” “fastidious and bland,” and “Punctilious of tie and suit.”

Laforgue also is behind the poem; and Baudelaire had not yet been digested, for the spleen recalls Laforgue's stance of ironic condescension to the futility of life.¹⁴ A satiric mask of romantic weltschmerz, Laforgue's flippant forbearance is very different from the “acedia, arising from the unsuccessful struggle towards the spiritual life” Eliot described in “Baudelaire” (Selected Essays, 1932 ed., p. 339). And Eliot's rapid movement from “Spleen” to his “individual and unusual” poem is from a more impersonal version (the difference is significant) of Laforgue's romantic irony to a poem in which the sort of spiritual crisis “universal in modern life” (“Baudelaire,” p. 341) that Baudelaire's poetry expressed is rendered dramatically (again the difference is significant).

The historical similarity between “Prufrock” and Conrad's story published the year before the century began includes not only the special status, but also the evolution of each. Conrad's “An Outpost of Progress” (1897) bears the same proleptic relationship to Heart of Darkness as “Spleen” does to “Prufrock.” In both cases the writer moved decisively from a thin if timely work to one of a totally different artistic order, a new creation that achieved great richness and power, and that did so by breaking new ground; yet in both cases the centrally important early Modernist work was essentially a realization of the earlier one's potentialities.

Despite Baudelaire's example of serious spiritual engagement with urban life, his less illustrious compatriot seems more instrumental in the evolution of the poet of “Prufrock” out of the poet of “Spleen.” It was as designated influence on Eliot's early poetry that most English-speaking readers first heard of Jules Laforgue (and Tristan Corbiere). But this history is of a particular, archetypal Modernist, poem; and Laforgue seems to be one of its two chief agents. The other, almost equally familiar as generalized Influence on Early Eliot, seems to be Henry James.

Exactly at the midpoint in time between his assertion about the Rubaiyat and “Prufrock” and now, Hugh Kenner published his imposing The Pound Era (University of California Press, 1971), with its account “of how our epoch was extricated from the fin de siécle”; (xi). Its first paragraph describes an elderly Henry James “en promenade” in London and its second, emblematically, Jame's encounter with the eponym of his book and its “era.” Following this protasis the chapter presents James as the forebear whose

great sensibility brought in a generation.

But for that sensibility “Prufrock” is unthinkable … (15-16)

By “sensibility” Professor Kenner seems to mean James's “attunement with the invisible,” his ceremoniousness, and above all his commitment to the precise rendering of an experience in every nuance of its complexity. In one of two pieces on James published in The Little Review in 1918, Eliot praised James for his ability to render experience directly, using a famous statement often quoted out of context. James had achieved “mastery over … escape from, Ideas”; “instead of thinking with our feelings … we corrupt our feelings with ideas.” The statement “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it” occurs in this context; hence, the sentence with which Eliot concludes the paragraph: “He is the most intelligent man of his generation.” In the other piece, he praised James for sharing with Hawthorne a concern for (in James's quoted phrase) “the deeper psychology” of characters; and writing during the time the great concern of Modernist fiction for precisely that had just begun to reveal itself, he declared that “in comparison with” those two novelists” almost all others may be accused of either superficiality or aridity.”¹⁵ Gordon cites his subsequent testimony of James's influence on him (46n; 49).

One of Harriet Monroe's complaints to Pound about “Prufrock” was that it was “too much like Henry James”; and a direct influence on that specific poem has been attributed to James by a number of critics, most of them citing characters in James's work as models.¹⁶ Whatever a reticent young Eliot may have owed for J. Alfred to romantically reticent or ineffectual James characters, the relevant—historically significant—influence concerns not a type of character, but an exemplary “sensibility,” which was manifested in a way of making art with characters. James's commitment to the precise rendering of experience and to “the deeper psychology” resulted in a fiction described in his own criticism, a fiction in which a subject's experience of reality is itself the reality portrayed, as though, in the words of Eliot's doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, reality “exists only as it is found in the experiences of finite centres.”¹⁷ As a result, the work becomes a hermetic (“dramatic”) object embodying the “reality” of its experiencing subject. Browning, for example, portrayed character—by relating the subject's reflections or discourse; but James portrayed consciousness—by relating the subject's experience. And then Eliot in “Prufrock” (and subsequently certain Modernist novels) presented consciousness—by relating a verbal record of the subject's (“finite centre's”) experiencing of her or his experience. Today all this is familiar (“it may appear … inevitable”); but to the twenty-two-year-old student in 1910 the fiction of James was a bridge. Eliot's subsequent interest in Bradley indicates the likely depth of his response to James's way of making art.

The other bridge was a poetic oeuvre Eliot believed himself to be the first person in the United States to own.¹⁸ And while the fiction of James, apparently even more positively than the poetry of Baudelaire, bore him to his subject, and to high purpose, Laforgue's poetry provided the access to his “development” of manner and method.¹⁹

The first book in English devoted to the French poetry that influenced such Modernists as Yeats, Stevens, Pound, and the Imagists was Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature, written with Yeats's close collaboration and dedicated to him. Eliot read it when an undergraduate and wrote in middle age, “But for having read his book I should not, in the year 1908, have heard of Laforgue. …”²⁰ In his “Introduction” to the 1928 Pound Selected Poems, he made the familiar declaration: “the form in which I began to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue together with the later Elizabethan drama” (8). The Laforgue connection was promptly established by two important early studies of his poetry, the chapters in Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) and Leavis' New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). Leavis quoted Eliot's declaration, and both critics drew the connection between “Conversation Galante” and one of Laforgue's Complaintes, which was quoted in Symons' half-dozen pages.

For one who did not live quite to his twenty-seventh birthday, Laforgue left a respectable corpus of imaginative prose writings, criticism, and idiosyncratic poetry. Laforgue's urban imagery has been mentioned; and in his aleatory way, Eliot mined the poetry for “Prufrock.”²¹ It is generally agreed that Laforgue's characteristic tone, also mentioned, which different critics have described as “cosmic detachment,” “gentlemanly despair,” and “bittersweet dandyism,” affected all Eliot's early poetry; Eliot himself wrote in “What Dante Means to Me” of his “recognition of a temperament akin to one's own,” “like an admired elder brother” (To Criticize the Critic, p. 126). In discussions that illuminate the hoary subject of Laforgue's influence, two recent critics make the important corrective point implied in Eliot's simile and consonant with his view of originality as development. In A. D. Moody's words, “The effect of his reading Laforgue was that he was galvanized into being himself.”²²

In the passage in “What Dante Means to Me,” Eliot subordinates his response to Laforgue's fraternal temperament to his interest in what he considers the “form of expression” corresponding to that temperament: Laforgue's combination of elegance and slanginess. Laforgue's “form of expression” “gives a clue to the discovery of one's own form,” to “the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech.” And that it was not the boulevardier's stance but the artist's “form”—not manner but method—that was of primary importance is indicated by his statement thirty years before in “The Metaphysical Poets” that Laforgue and Corbiere “are nearer to the ‘school of Donne’ than any modern English poet,” because all were “trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling” in a civilization of “great variety and complexity”: “The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (Selected Essays, pp. 248-49).

The idea is as familiar to us, near the end of the century, as that of the hermetic work whose subject expresses itself. But “Prufrock” was created when the century had scarcely begun; the “states of mind and feeling” it comprises have a uniquely wide range among Eliot's early poems; and—the significant point—we know so from its diction. Laforgue's poetry provided the young Eliot with the “clue” for evolving a language of his own which would be equal to the task, adumbrated for him by James's fiction, of precisely rendering in all its complexity an experiencing consciousness.

In the quoted attribution of debt to Laforgue in his “Introduction” to the Pound volume, Eliot uses the word “form” differently from “form of expression”: he derived “the form in which I began to write” not from “a clue to” diction (“idiom of speech”), but from “the study of” the “versification” of “Laforgue together with the later Elizabethan drama.” Laforgue increasingly in his poetry employed heavy rhyme, often to ironic effect (as in “Prufrock” far more than in other of Eliot's early poems), and combined varied line-lengths and meters with Alexandrines. “The vers libre of Jules Laforgue,” who was “certainly the most important technical innovator” in French poetry, Eliot wrote there, “stretches, contracts, and distorts the traditional French measure as later Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry stretches, contracts and distorts the blank verse measure.” His discussion of invention and originality, quoted from in the opening paragraphs, begins on the next page (9). A “technical innovator,” he declares there, does not “invent technique … because [in the phrase he uses in defining “true originality”] it is impossible.” But as with his functional diction in “Prufrock,” so with his elastic versification, Eliot did not merely “imitate technique” developed by the innovators he cites: his debt to Laforgue and the English tradition (respectively the “school of Donne” and the “later Elizabethan drama”) is for providing the “clue” his own authentic “originality” used precisely to “develop technique.”

Eliot insists that in poetry the true innovator never invents; instead, he or she “forces” and “stretches,” “dislocates” and “distorts,” what has been given into something new. But if what has been given is itself new, as James and Laforgue, for example, were new in his youth, then newness might be compounded—even, metaphorically, squared. Hence, the right individual talent could be devoted to tradition and vigorously decry “the poem which is absolutely original,” and yet could actually “develop” the harbinger of a wholly new English poetry. That is what the young T. S. Eliot seems to have done

The final element in this delineation of Eliot's achievement in “Prufrock” also involves Laforgue. He provided the clue for the narrative strategy Eliot developed to achieve his neo-Jamesian objective of rendering directly an experiencing consciousness. And the historical conjunction that occurred is especially significant of the place of “Prufrock” in the history of Modernism in English literature.

When Ulysses appeared in 1922, its most accessible part proved to be its most sensational: Molly Bloom's concluding chapter. Her stream-of-consciousness, uninterrupted inner (“interior”) monologue helped fix the new narrative strategy of representing consciousness as language—introduced to readers of avant-garde literature by the published earlier chapters of Ulysses and the first novels of Dorothy Richardson—as the most distinctive innovation of Modernist fiction. Ignoring Richardson and feasible antecedents in earlier English novelists, Joyce attributed monologue intérieur, as his friend Valery Larbaud named the new narrative strategy, to a novel by the still-living late nineteenth-century French writer Édouard Dujardin, and thereby made the old man famous and appreciative (“James Joyce, maître glorieux … qui a dit au mort … Reléve-toi Lazare”); the story is relatively familiar.²³

However, Symons wrote “It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue”; Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann's The Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten) “became a veritable bible to him”; and his friend Gustave Kahn drew attention to his attempts to reproduce thought, especially in Dernier Vers.²⁴ These attempts usually take the form of sudden apostrophe or emotional interjection, as in the popular “Solo de Lune.” But however qualified, Laforgue's endeavor to supplant discourse with the direct verbal representation of a mental state is apparent. In his comprehensive essay on “Eliot and Nineteenth-Century French Poetry,” Francis Scarfe writes, “Laforgue invented a new kind of dramatic monologue, usually known as the interior or internal monologue …” and then mentions a little-known literary indebtendness which reveals the conjunction significant of the historical situation and role of “Prufrock”:

From Laforgue, his close friend, Édouard Dujardin, without acknowledgement, developed the technique of his short novel Les Lauries sont coupé. This technique was taken up by Valery Larbaud and James Joyce. … Eliot, long before them, had taken the form directly from Laforgue himself …²⁵

What Eliot “had taken,” his originality metamorphosed in “Prufrock.” Other of his early poems, “Portrait of a Lady” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” especially, have a Laforgian-Jamesian focus on the speaker's experiencing consciousness; but only “Prufrock” is constituted by a direct verbal representation of the process itself of consciousness. “Prufrock” inaugurates the focus and the narrative technique that were to become so prominent in Modernist English literature. In fact, it anticipates the most sensational and famous instance of the use of that technique. The last chapter of Ulysses is precisely like “Prufrock”: 1) an uninterrupted verbal representation (“stream”) of consciousness that is simultaneously 2) a soliloquy expressing 3) a conflict between alternative attitudes the outcome of which is 4) fundamental to the character's destiny.

To attribute the origin of Molly Bloom's soliloquy to “Prufrock” would be specious anyway; but the historical concern of this essay is much broader than the attribution of sources. And evidence of the role of “Prufrock” in the advent of a new kind of literature abounds. For example, taking Molly's soliloquy as reference and looking backward, “Prufrock” has a special relationship to a story Molly's creator wrote in 1905 and to the portrayal of psychological bifurcation by various writers of the fin-de-siècle, more than once by both Wilde and Conrad. Eliot was to call the portrayal in Laforgue's poetry “a dédoublement of the personality.”²⁶

In “A Painful Case” Joyce presented, in a dreary urban setting, an emotionally-blocked bourgeois, radically isolated as a consequence, aware of his predicament and suffering in it, who nevertheless himself has frustrated an opportunity for rescue. Joyce was twenty-three, Eliot's age when he finished “Prufrock,” six years later.

Implicit in the literary motif of doubleness is psychomachia; and its pertinence to the spirit of that time was exemplified in the creation by William Sharp of Fiona Macleod and in the mask preoccupation of Sharp's friend Yeats. Gérard de Nerval wrote (in Aurélia), “Une idée terrible me vint: ‘L'homme est double,’ me dis-je.” Among other writers of the time, that psychomachia was expressed by Laforgue himself in the phrase (in “Dimanches”) “Mon Moi,” in Nietzsche's “Ich bin ein doppelgänger”; (Ecce Homo, 1, 3) and in Rimbaud's “Je est un autre”; and that psychological situation, expressed by writers with whom Eliot recognized an affinity, is at the very center of “Prufrock.”

Like the final chapter of Ulysses, these examples of cultural and literary relationship are elements in the historical situation of “Prufrock,” further establishing the role it played as harbinger of, and archetypal “development” of the received tradition into, a new poetry—the role which helps explain its special canonical status in the literature that dominated most of this century.

Leavis' declaration in 1932 that it “represents a complete break with the nineteenth-century tradition, and a new start” is a symptom of its role, as is G. S. Fraser's in 1948 that “As the Russians all came out of Gogol's Overcoat, we might say that we all came out of Prufrock's drawing room. Nearly every important innovation in the English verse of the last thirty years is implicit in this poem.”²⁷

But Fraser's allowing the declaration to stand in a book published in 1977 is historical confirmation more than symptom. In the alembic of “Prufrock” Eliot distilled ingredients he found about him into something new and intoxicating.

Notes

1. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot(1959;rpt. Harbinger-Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969),p.3.

2. “Conversation Galante,” the first two “Preludes” and “Portrait of a Lady” antedate its completion. See also The Invisible Poet, pp. 33 and 35; and Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 9. The quoted phrase is from the flyleaf of Collected Poems: 1909-1962 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963).

3. John C. Pope, “Prufrock and Raskolnikov Again: A Letter from Eliot,” American Literature, XVIII (1947), 319. For general confirmation of Eliot's dating see, for example, the chronology, facing p. 17 in A. D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

4. For an account of Eliot's fashioning of The Waste Land out of the drafts, see Stanley Sultan, Ulysses, The Waste Land and Modernism: A Jubilee Study (Kennikat Press, 1977), pp. 20-28.

5. Letter to Harriet Monroe, dated December 1, 1961. The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950), p. 66. The previous quotation is from a letter to her dated September 30, 1914, and printed on p. 40. Monro changed his mind when he read “Prufrock” again in Poetry; see Ellen Williams, Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry, 1912-22 (University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 127. The testimony of Aiken is from “King Bolo and Others,” in Richard March and Tambimuttu, eds., T. S. Eliot: A Symposium … (Books for Libraries Press, 1968), p. 22.

6. For instance, in Chapter XIX of Shelley's novel, Frankenstein's creature says,

   For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears … For an instant I dared to shake off my chains and look around me with a free and lofty spirit, but the iron had eaten into my flesh and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.

   Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein (London: Dent, 1963), p. 171. Other instances are Werther, Heathcliff, Julien Sorel, Peer Gynt, and even to an extent Stephen Dedalus. In T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History (Louisiana State University Press, 1983), Gregory S. Jay argues for the gradual development of failed aspiration (by way of Browning) out of “the Greater Romantic Lyric” (94-99).

7. See, respectively: Sultan, p. 73; Elisabeth Schneider, T. S. Eliot, The Pattern in the Carpet (University of California Press, 1975), pp. 27-28, 31-32; and The Invisible Poet, p. 40. The letter to Aldington is quoted in T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile …, ed. Valerie Eliot (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. xxii. See also n. 30 to “Ghostly Selves” (241-42), in Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study of Character and Style (Oxford University Press, 1983).

8. Leonard Unger, Eliot's Compound Ghost: Influence and Confluence (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), pp. 29-30. For one attribution to the Rubaiyat, the Marvellian “To have squeezed the universe into a ball,” Professor Schneider instead proposes a passage in Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature (13n).

9. See Schneider, p. 46; and Eliot's Compound Ghost, pp. 22, 23, 27-28.

10. See Moody, p. 36; Darrel Abel, “R. L. S. and ‘Prufrock,’” Notes and Queries, CXCVIII (1953), 37-38; and T. S. Matthews, Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (Harper & Row, 1973), p. 36. Kipling's poem is in “Beyond the Pale,” a story in Plain Tales from the Hills.

11. Regarding Conrad, see B. C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 3rd. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 102; and Eliot's Compound Ghost, pp. 65-55, 108. Regarding Baudelaire, see, for example, Schneider, pp. 12-13; and Moody, pp. 29-30.

12. Quoted from To Criticize the Critic (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), p. 126. The passage occurs in “What Dante Means to Me,” first published in 1950. His statement in the title essay, published eleven years later, “the modern poet who influenced me was not Baudelaire but Jules Laforgue” is in the context of his observation that a great poet “can hardly influence, he can only be imitated” (18). See also Moody, pp. 4-5.

13. See Schneider, pp. 10-13; Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot (Houghton Mifflin, 1964), pp. 106-07.

14. See, for example, Moody, p. 20; and Leonard Unger, T. S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns (University of Minnesota Press, 1956 [1967]), pp. 10-11.

15. Quoted from Edmund Wilson, ed., The Shock of Recognition (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), II, pp. 856-57, 861.

16. See, for example, George Fraser, Essays on Twentieth Century Poets (Rowman and Littlefield, 1978), p. 105; The Pound Era, p. 16; F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 3rd ed. (1958; rpt. Galaxy-Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 70; Moody, pp. 30, 37; Smith, p. 15; William York Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature: 1885-1956 (1947; rpt. Vintage, 1956), p. 278; Moments and Patterns, p. 12; Eliot's Compound Ghost, p. 9. For Monroe's remark, see Stanley K. Coffman, Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 43.

17. Quoted from J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965; rpt. Atheneum, 1969), p. 134. Professor Miller discusses Eliot's early poetry, including “Prufrock,” as “more or less contemporary” with his dissertation, although he began graduate study in philosophy after “Prufrock” (as well as other poems) was written, and “there is no evidence” that he had “been acquainted with Bradley's work” when he wrote it (Eliot's Compound Ghost, p. 11). For a more persuasive attribution of intellectual indebtedness to Henri Bergson, see Piers Gray, T. S. Eliot's Intellectual and Poetic Development: 1909-1922 (Sussex: Harvester, 1982), pp. 52-84 passim.

18. Howarth, p. 105.

19. “But even Baudelaire had not aroused him to the intuition of a form and a voice in which he could make poetry of his own knowledge of the city. … Then Laforgue came to him, revealing form, voice, stance” (Howarth, p. 107).

20. Quoted from The Criterion, IX (January 1930) in Eliot's Compound Ghost, p. 97. The statement occurs in a review of Baudelaire and the Symbolists by Peter Quennell.

21. See, for example, the pair of “declamations” by “Le Monsieur” and “La Dame” in “Le Concile féerique,” and “Solo de Lune”; see also Howarth, p. 196.

22. Moody, p. 18. Professor Schneider writes, “the mask that Laforgue had devised fitted Eliot nearly enough to point the way to his own” (13).

23. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 520n.

24. Symons, p. 60; Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue (Grove Press, 1956), pp. 6, 84; see also p. 21.

25. In Graham Martin, ed., Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium (Humanities Press, 1970), pp. 45-61, p. 53.

26. T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion, XII (1933), 470. Quoted in Gray, p. 68.

27. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1960 [1964]), p. 75; “A Language by Itself,” in T. S. Eliot A Symposium …, p. 175; and Fraser, p. 106. The essay and statement also appear in Fraser's Vision and Rhetoric (London: Faber and Faber, 1959).