SOURCE: “Notes and Queries,” in American Literature, Vol.18, No. 4, January, 1947, pp. 319-21.

In the following essay, Pope reprints and comments on a letter from Eliot explaining some of his sources for “Prufrock” and its connection to Crime and Punishment.

Mr. T. S. Eliot has supplied me with some important corrections for my article, “Prufrock and Raskolnikov,” which appeared in American Literature, XVII, 213-230 (November, 1945). I was wrong in attributing the resemblances between “Prufrock” and Crime and Punishment to Mrs. Garnett's translation, and in supposing as a consequence that the poem had been composed (I rashly said “conceived”) after October, 1914. The actual details are of such interest that I have secured Mr. Eliot's permission to quote his account in full, from a letter of March 8, 1946:

I have never read Mrs. Garnett's translation of Crime and Punishment. The poem of Prufrock was conceived some time in 1910. I think that when...