SOURCE: “Tradition and the Individual Talent in ‘Prufrock’,” in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1, March, 1985, pp. 77-90.

In the following essay, Sultan argues that “Prufrock”'s success is due in part to its role as a harbinger of the modernist movement.

“The best known English poem since the Rubaiyat”; it was called in 1959, and probably both was so and is.¹ Certainly no other one is more likely to be included in a collection of English poetry of this century; and two generations of teachers have introduced it to secondary-school seniors and college freshmen. Long before 1959 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” had achieved special canonical status.

One cause of that status was high regard for the poem itself. But I believe another was historical, and that the vantage afforded by the quarter-century since 1959 reveals “Prufrock” to be a most eloquent cultural artifact—both as harbinger of...