"
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "
Prufrock", is a poem by American-British poet
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of
Ezra Pound (1885–1972). It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet (or
chapbook) titled
Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the time of its publication, Prufrock was considered outlandish, but is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th-century
Romantic verse and
Georgian lyrics to
Modernism. The poem is regarded as the beginning of Eliot's career as an influential poet.