Best Ever
Poetry?

“Let us go then, you and I.” The invitation seems simple enough. But where are we going? Who is the “you”? By the time Eliot has compared the evening to “a patient etherized upon a table,” we’re somewhere new — a poetic landscape that didn’t exist before this poem created it. Prufrock was the announcement of modernism, and nothing would sound quite the same again.

The poem is about a man who cannot act. Prufrock wants to speak, to declare himself, to ask the overwhelming question — but he keeps deferring, digressing, drowning in self-consciousness. “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” The answer, always, is no. He measures out his life in coffee spoons. He has seen the moment of his greatness flicker. He is not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. The self-deprecation is so total it becomes its own kind of grandeur.

Eliot was twenty-two when he wrote it, a graduate student in philosophy, and the poem’s intellectual architecture is formidable. Allusions pile up: Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, Hesiod, Marvel. But they’re not showing off. They’re showing how a certain kind of mind works — how Prufrock can’t experience anything directly because everything reminds him of something else, because culture has become a prison of references that forestall action.

The form enacts the content. The rhymes are irregular, sometimes close together, sometimes pages apart, creating an effect of almost-pattern that never quite resolves. The meter shifts between iambic pentameter and free verse, certainty and drift. The repetitions — “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” — arrive like intrusive thoughts, disrupting whatever progress the poem seems to be making. You can’t get anywhere because Prufrock can’t get anywhere.

The imagery is urban and alienated. Yellow fog, sawdust restaurants, cheap hotels, lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows. This is the modern city as wasteland, a landscape that Eliot would explore more fully in The Waste Land but that appears here in concentrated form. The fog doesn’t just obscure — it “rubs its back upon the window-panes,” a cat-like presence that transforms the inanimate into the vaguely threatening.

The women are the poem’s absent center. Prufrock thinks about them constantly — their arms, their perfume, the way they might reduce him with a dismissive phrase — but they never speak, never act except in his imagination. They’re projections of his fear, figures he’s constructed to justify his inaction. The social world he moves through is entirely inside his head. That’s the tragedy and the comedy at once.

The ending drops into dream logic. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.” Beauty exists. Prufrock knows it exists. But it’s not for him. He can watch it from a distance, drowning in human voices when the spell breaks. The mermaids are art, possibility, connection — everything Prufrock sees but cannot reach.

Every alienated narrator since owes something to this poem. Every interior monologue that drifts between time periods, every self-aware voice that undercuts its own authority — Eliot made it possible. He found a form for modern consciousness, for the way we live inside our heads while the world happens elsewhere.

Do I dare to eat a peach? You already know the answer.

T.S. Eliot: The Best Ever is paralysis as music. Is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock the Best Ever Modernist Poem? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• Collected Poems 1909-1962 is the authoritative Eliot volume — start here.
• The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry places Prufrock in essential context.
• The Faber edition with annotations illuminates every allusion.
• Eliot’s own recordings of the poem reveal how he heard the rhythms.