ABSTRACT
When we open T.S. Eliot's collected poems, the first poem we encounter, 'The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', invites us to an evening walk through a
foggy city. After traversing the epigraph, a tract of Dante in Italian, we read:
These famous lines, written in Eliot's early twenties, opened the career of a
great poet and literary innovator. For my present purpose, though, I am
interested in the way in which they point to Eliot's concern with the city as
poetic material, which was prominent in the first phase of his poetry. Most of
the action of 'Prufrock' -if that is the word for it-takes place indoors, in the polite, futile order of teacups and coffee spoons - but later in the poem the
image of a nocturnal walk recurs:
In the poems that follow 'Prufrock' the city provides subject-matter as well as
setting. In these poems the city is not named, but in The Waste Land of 1922
we are located in the named streets and thoroughfares of contemporary London.
