SOURCE: “Identifying the ‘Lazarus’ in Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’” in English Language Notes, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, September, 1994, pp. 66-70.

In the following essay, Campo discusses the sources for “Prufrock”'s Lazarus imagery.

While Helen Gardner has warned that T. S. Eliot's poetry features “a deep ambiguity which is not the critic's business to remove,”¹ determining which Lazarus Eliot is referring to in his “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” should lead to a fuller appreciation of the poem, not a diminution of Eliot's work. The reference to Lazarus appears in line 94 of the poem; the stanza in which it appears reads as follows:

And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a...