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‘Prufrock’ in a Nutshell
You love to read literary criticism, don’t you? Of course, you do. It’s why you come to Ricochet. So let me offer you a small diversion this morning by analyzing one of the staples of the British literary canon, T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I think I can do this by focusing our attention on only three lines from the poem.
If you remember, Love Song is a portrait of an upper-middle-class Englishman, perhaps a banker (like T. S. Eliot himself was for a time), a little twit, anxious and afraid of life, who comes to an understanding of what he is during the course of the poem. Here, then, is the first sentence I’d like to consider.
“In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.”
King Arthur is probably the world’s best-known fictional character. Writers from the 11th century’s Chrétien de Troyes to Bernard Cornwell in the 21st century have written stories about him. And the King Arthur’s legend keeps growing. A story this well-known must have a historical basis.
“The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams,” by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 656 pages, $35.00 (Hardcover)