"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was T.S. Eliot's first published poem. Over five years elapsed between the time writing began and the time of publication, largely because Eliot had some considerable difficulty in convincing publishers that the poem was "poetry" at all. In 1910, when Eliot began writing the poem, poetry was generally struck in a pastoral Edwardian era marked by regular rhyme schemes and structures and "acceptable" topics like nature, love and death. "Prufrock" is not at all this sort of poem, exhibiting instead a stream-of-consciousness technique which leaps from thought to thought, something which would come to characterize Modernist writing, as well as would the use of mixed metrical structure. Indeed, it intermingles blank verse with free verse (at the time, extremely unusual in poetry) and traditional rhyming verse. We also find lines in which the assonance seems to fall in unusual places, which has the effect of pulling the reader into the strangeness of Prufrock's internal monologue:

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin

Effectively, publishers rejected "Prufrock" initially because it was unique. They did not understand its strange shift from unrhymed iambic pentameter to rhyming couplets, or its use of Italian, or its stream-of-consciousness musings. It baffled in terms of structure, rhyme and theme. However, the early critical reception to the poem indicates that those who did understand it recognized immediately that it would come to change the face of poetry and how we understand it.