... critical prose set the aesthetic standards for the New Criticism, and his journal  Criterion  was one of the primary arbiters of taste throughout the 1920's and 1930's. Eliot's wide-ranging but relatively small corpus of work, the precocious "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," " (1915), the seminal "The Waste Land" (1922), and the later "Four Quartets" (1943), ... which Eliot considered his masterpiece "has made him the primary figure of modernist poetry both for his peers and for subsequent generations." Eliot's first truly mature piece of verse, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Pru...

• Word Count: 4134
• Approx Pages: 17
• Grade Level: High School

... and symbols, allusion and reference and word choice were extended: at the same time the limits of syntax as a resource for the expression of meaning were explored. Here is an example from the opening of T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, first published in 1915: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; ... Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster ... shells: Streets that follow like a tedi...

• Word Count: 10566
• Approx Pages: 42

... as the speaker 'drank coffee, and talked for an hour'. The '[drinking] of coffee' is a menial act, suggesting the inanimate qualities of people in need of stimulus, whilst the indolent conversation which follows indicates the hollow existence of Western aristocratic society; a concept explored further in Eliot's 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock', as '[he has] measured out [his] life in coffee spoons' implying a meticulously planned ... rationale, investing effort solely in the material tedium of 'drinking coffee'. The juxtaposition between &apos ... ...

• Word Count: 1365
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate