Bonus: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot
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"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
T.S. Eliot
1915

The Summary
A poem about growing old and growing gray - and all the strange and unfortunate flaws that come with it.

The Good
I found T.S. Eliot's poem particularly lovely and insightful, if only a little morbid and slightly strange. The words of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are beautiful and the imagery evocative, lingering in the mind and melding myth, reality, and dream into a single, complex entity.

While a little lengthy, the poem creates a unique and surreal world populated with human worries and illusory characters that compels one to read it again and again.

It is quirky, but beautiful for its strangeness and ambiguity.

The Bad
For all intents and purposes, Eliot's poem remains a little vague. It combines dream-like imagery with a complex and heady brew of vocabulary, fashioning an unsettling situation and an even stranger, more ambiguous setting.

The Ugly
The idea of reality imposing itself upon the individual - crushing, drowning, and, in essence, destroying the individual you have been and you continue to be or wish to be - is a distinctly terrifying and worrisome notion that Eliot forcefully highlights in his poem.

Reality, and age, are inescapable.

[Visit The Poetry Foundation for the full version of Eliot's poem.]