3 - Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

Summary

The volume of 1917 was Eliot's first published volume of poems: the individual poems were written at various times from 1910 and some of them had been published in magazines, but the 1917 volume appears to have been carefully put together, and should be seen as a whole. The volume is dedicated to Jean Verdenal, a young Frenchman whom Eliot met in Paris during his year there from 1910–11. He was a medical student with literary interests, who shared Eliot's enthusiasm for Laforgue and other modern French writers including Charles Maurras (the political thinker and leader of the Action Française). The epigraph from Dante (Purgatorio XXI, 133–6) suggests the strength of Eliot's feeling for Verdenal, who was killed in the French expedition to the Dardanelles in 1915, but it also gives some clue to Eliot's attitude to his poems: ‘Now can you understand the quality of love which warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing’ (Eliot's own translation in his essay on Dante, 1929). In Dante the Roman poet Statius is talking to his fellow-poet, Virgil, whom he has tried to embrace, forgetting that they are both mere spirits or shades.