A short introduction to the landmark poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T. S. Eliot
1. One poetry bookseller rejected the poem on the grounds that it was ‘absolutely insane’. Harold Monro, influential publisher and owner of the Poetry Bookshop in London, was offered the chance to publish ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It’s a curious fact that he could have been the first person to get T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking modernist poem into print, but he wasn’t interested. He flung it back, labelling it ‘insane’, as Peter Ackroyd records in his lucid and informative biography T.S.Eliot