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The Love Song

T.S. Eliot - The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

When I first read this poem I was eighteen, at university, starting out on a degree in English literature. 20th century American poetry was a highlight for an eighteen year old, the lives and the poetry, the casting aside of tradition, of form and expression, of seeking a new way of saying something, of even endeavouring to say something new, to take literature on a new path.

I read this poem once and instantly knew that it was going to take sometime to get inside the words, the spirit of the poetry. And indeed it did. I sat at a bus stop waiting for a late bus one Friday night and read the poem over a dozen times (the bus must have been late), and just as the headlights of the bus turned the corner, I finally grasped what T.S. Eliot was on about.