SOURCE: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot: A Poem-By-Poem Analysis, Thames and Hudson, 1955, pp. 57-70.

In the following essay, Williamson provides a close analysis of “Prufrock.”

The mixture of levity and seriousness immediately confronts the reader in the title poem of Prufrock and OtherObservations. For he transposes his epigraph from the serious context of Dante's Inferno to the lighter context of Prufrock's love song. The epigraph is never to be ignored in Eliot for while it is not an essential part of the poem, it conveys hints of the significance or even genesis of the poem. Together with the title, it prepares the reader for the experience of the poem. Thus the first rule in reading one of Eliot's poems is to consider the possibilities suggested by the title and epigraph.

In this poem (1915) we have the love song...