Which poet wrote 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'?

T. S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was his first professionally published poem and became a landmark of literary modernism.

Eliot began writing the poem around 1910, while he was still an American-born student and emerging writer. It first appeared in Poetry magazine in June 1915 after Ezra Pound recommended it to editor Harriet Monroe. The poem was later included in Eliot’s 1917 collection Prufrock and Other Observations.

The speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock, is an anxious, self-conscious man who struggles with indecision, ageing, social embarrassment, and emotional isolation. The poem’s fragmented images, shifting thoughts, urban setting, and stream-of-consciousness style helped introduce a new modern poetic voice.

A common mix-up is Ezra Pound, who helped secure the poem’s publication but did not write it. Eliot later became famous for The Waste Land and received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature.