Reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot, because it's mentioned in Baumgartner by Paul Auster. I get the translation of the Dante quote. I read about Lazarus.
"At the time of its publication, "Prufrock" was considered outlandish, but the poem is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic shift in poetry from late 19th-century Romanticism and Georgian lyrics to Modernism." (Wikipedia)
"The poem, described as a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said "to epitomize [the] frustration and impotence of the modern individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment". (op cit)
"Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life, and lack of spiritual progress, and is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of aging and mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognized voices in modern literature." (op cit)
All I really know about Eliot is that he's an example of a fellow who worked 9-5 in a bank and cranked out "modern" poetry. And when his wife became difficult he bung her into an insane asylum. Written in 1910, the poem is 124 years old, when Eliot was 22 years old. Eliot has been dead almost 60 years, more than my whole lifetime.
He was born in St. Louis. His father owned a brick company and his mother was a social worker and wrote poetry. He went to Smith Academy, then Milton Academy, then Harvard. He went to Paris and studied, and then back to Harvard for graduate school, then to Merton college in Oxford. He went to London and began teaching. He married Vivienne Haigh-Wood to stay in England. You can read the rest on Wikipedia.
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