SOURCE: “Prufrock and After: The Theme of Change,” in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 87, No. 5, October, 1972, pp. 1103-8.

In the following excerpt, Schneider discusses the role of “Prufrock” in Eliot's transformation from skeptic to religious believer.

The transformation of T. S. Eliot from skeptic to religious believer was a public event and to the literary world quite a spectacular one. Criticism has been busy with it ever since, following often at considerable length—now and then at considerable distance too—the course of his journey from a view of the Church as Hippopotamus “wrapt in the old miasmal mist” to a Christian faith that “all shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well.” The substance of his later belief he made explicit in his writing, and the change has been welcomed, denounced, scoffed at, and analyzed from many angles, with or...