In English class tonight (one of the three I’m taking) we were supposed to discuss “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. There wasn’t enough time to get into it well enough, and I got the distinct impression that my professor didn’t like it near as much as he liked the Auden poem we discussed before it.

I love the poem, and felt really unsatisfied by tonight’s discussion because while I love the poem I’ve never been in a classroom setting the discussed the poem. Because I feel so unfulfilled, I decided to read up on it after I did my writing class’s assignmnt. If this thing shows my other blogs, you can check it out. It’s vitalitywellness.blogspot.com. We did a pretty rocking job, I must say. That would be one heck of a gym. I’d join.

I digress. Back to T.S. Eliot. We did discuss the name J. Alfred Prufrock in class. As it turns out, Eliot wanted the name to be a combination of the words “prude” and “frock” and the original name of the poem was “Prufrock Among The Women”. Eliot started writing it when he was in college, but published it several years later. Interestingly, he signed the poem “T. Stearnes Eliot”, which would lead you to believe that the fears and insecurities that the title character feels mirror Eliot’s. Eliot did not approve of poets who wrote poems about themselves, so he made Prufrock an older, middle-aged man and dramatized the narrative. I feel like that didn’t take all the Eliot out of the Prufrock, but he might not have agreed.

Yes, Eliot was kind of Pound-ish in his pretensions, but I really enjoy his work and even though this part of the class is over I will definitely continue to learn more on my own. That’s what learning’s all about, I suppose.