J Alfred Prufrock

"'Inevitability', unavoidable phrasing seems to me a crucial attribute of great poetry." (Harold Bloom)

There is something very resonant and inevitable about Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock that makes me shudder and laugh. The powerlessness of total subjectivity could hardly be better expressed.

...For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?...

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