12: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In this extra-special, extra-long episode we explore T.S. Eliot’s famous love song. This poem continues with the horror theme and begins with an epigraph, or six-line quotation, in the original Italian from Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno. References to Dante pop-up a lot in Eliot’s work.

The epigraph hints that the poem that follows is about to describe some type of hell. The gist of the quote is that the speaker, Guido, agrees to tell Dante his sins because he thinks Dante will never escape hell to tell anyone else.