"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as teenaged wasteland

Though the large body of criticism on T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" reads the titular narrator as a middle-aged man, I would like to join the critical discourse to offer an alternate reading: that Prufrock is a teenager. I argue that Prufrock as a teenaged persona provides Eliot with a decidedly modern mechanism for an allencompassing sensibility and strikes much greater consonance with both Eliot's criticism and poetics, as well as, explicating the continued presence of the poem in the high school English classroom. I will outline Eliot's early poetic development, focusing on adaptation of Matthew Arnold's Victorian Romantacism to the Modern world and his indoctrination in the work of the French Symbolists Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire, who taught Eliot that, "the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry" (To Criticize the Critic, 126). With "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Eliot therefore develops a narrative for teenaged experience that became a blueprint for young adult male experience; the afterlife of Eliot's poem, which I will explore in British and American rock, forms another key piece of its continued ability to still relate to the world over one hundred years after its initial composition and publication.