On this fortnight’s episode of Texting, Tomek and I dare disturb the universe of respectable literary criticism with an often irreverent and occasionally ribald analysis of T.S. Eliot’s debut poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” During our marathon conversation—which to my astonishment and dismay is actually longer than the O.J. episode—my co-host and I reflect on Old Possum’s “ostentation of erudition,” his influence on the Modernist aesthetic, his debt to the metaphysical poets, his alleged anti-Semitism, and his relation to contemporaries such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Marcel Proust. We also consider whether or not the eminent Nobel laureate was the world’s first incel. Along the way, there is a fair amount of peach-eating, ball-squeezing, tea-bagging, and carpet-munching. But it is impossible to say just what I mean—and here’s no great matter. All of which leads to an overwhelming question: does that “pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas” belong to a crab or a lobster?
Press play above for the full audio version of the pod and/or watch the slide show on YouTube:
Show Notes
My apologies for posting two days late. I assure you there was no insidious intent.
Thanks to Germana for reading the Italian epigraph and to Tom for reading the poem proper, providing an audio testimonial, preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet (see thumbnail above), and suggesting the topic.
Thanks also to Gilbert Adair and G.J. Villa for their reactions to the poem.
I guess we could say Nas left Jay-Z “etherized upon a table”:
Was Jerry Hall Bryan Ferry’s “sea-girl wreathed with seaweed red and brown”?
The Love Song of J. Alfred Jamrock?
I said Works and Days is Hesiod’s most famous work but I forgot to mention the Theogony.
The misremembered quote from The Waste Land is a beauty: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
The misremembered quote from Robinson Jeffers is also good: “As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.”
And here’s that post on Eliot’s late amatory verse again in case you missed it:
The Next Text
As requested, Gaddafi’s 2009 UN speech. Stay tuned, textual deviants.
How Should We Presume?