SOURCE: “The Function of ‘Prufrock’ for Criticism,” in T. S. Eliot Annual, Vol. 1, edited by Shyamal Bagchee, The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1990, pp.155-96.

In the following essay, Sultan examines “Prufrock”'s place in modern literary criticism.

This is the second of two unforeseen essays on the most familiar English poem of the twentieth century. My original intention was simply to write a modest (and tractable) piece pointing to certain important qualities of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ I did not find mentioned in the extensive published criticism. It was frustrated by a gradual awareness of the extraordinary historical relationship Eliot's poem has both with (to use his word) the tradition behind it, and with English literature and literary criticism since its advent.

Remarkably, in 1911 a graduate student barely into his twenties, and working in virtual isolation, created the principal harbinger/archetype of the English poetry of...