In the last semester before earning the degree from San Jose State University, I was in a Humanities class. A local poet was brought in to read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I had memorized it, just because I could and did do that sort of thing in those days. So I was reciting it to myself as he read it. There is an important beat in the poem. After referencing the Sirens ( I have heard the mermaids singing each to each), Eliot begins the next verse with the sentence, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” The line is the capstone of the entire poem, which is a paean to the absolute hopelessness of finding transcendence from your chosen profession. When the poet got to that line he skipped it. He was actually reading the poem and missed the line. I was about to yell out the line in the class when he realized what he had done and corrected himself ( saved by the bell).
Prufrock is one of two or three poems that has had such profound influence on my thoughts, that I would call it the most significant poem I had read. At Colby, English professor Howard Koonce had an office in our dorm, Foss-Woodman. I went there regularly, sometimes several times a day, to get insulted and to find, like any other sentient Physics major, transcendence from the artifice of his chosen profession. We disagreed on many writers; he degraded Steinbeck, my favorite author, we both adored Frost – you can’t really live in New England without loving Frost. I was just starting to read Eliot’s poetry. Professor Koonce viewed the esteem many Colby English majors had for TS Eliot with disdain, but, perhaps, the same gentle disdain with which he would often treat me. If I had the chance today I think I would challenge him on it. As the years passed the poem has grown more illuminating to me, so that, while attending Berkeley’s Lunch Poems earlier this month and overhearing some student criticizing a poet’s overworked metaphor, the line, “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo./” lanced my mind.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock