SOURCE: “‘Prufrock’ as Key to Eliot's Poetry,” in Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker, The Modern Language Association of America, 1988, pp. 88-93.

In the following essay, Smith argues that “Prufrock” shaped Eliot's entire career as a poet.

A strategy to identify the essence of Eliot beyond, as well as within, a single poem needs the right poem. To make “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” this poem, whether one is proposing to teach Eliot comprehensively or selectively, offers several advantages. “Prufrock” is familiar and is outstanding in interest and attractiveness; it comes near the beginning of the canon; it links in theme and technique with various other poems by Eliot; and, most useful, it anticipates certain equally familiar critical principles (two especially) that he was to declare. Those principles, though they only took shape ten years further on, in his most...