As we mentioned in class already, most of us should be familiar with T.S. Eliot’s famous poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I did a bit of research on this poem and (perhaps unsurprisingly) found a lot of parallels to Eliot’s later work The Wasteland.
First of all, the poem at first was considered sort of weird. One bookseller wouldn’t accept it, calling the work “absolutely insane.” Harsh, right? Similarly, I think we can all agree that The Wasteland is certainly not conventional. Just one example is the jarring shifts in voice.
Second, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock had a lot of famous influences. One was Dante, to whom Eliot also makes reference in The Waste Land. I thought it was cool that The Love Song also references Hamlet, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Chaucer.
Third, Ezra Pound is the one who convinced Eliot to publish the poem in 1915.
Fourth, The Love Song has a sort of depressing collection of themes. Of course, The Waste Land isn’t all that uplifting, either. One common theme across these two works is a “sense of decay.”
Five. Eliot originally used an epigraph at the beginning of The Love Song from Dante’s work The Divine Comedy. He ended up not putting the quotation in, but he did decide to use it at one point in The Waste Land (the reference to Guido).
Six…This one is obvious, but both works were written during a very confusing, disruptive, and all-around awful period in world history - World War I.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock
https://interestingliterature.com/2015/10/13/five-fascinating-facts-about-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock/
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