Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
Acclaimed today as a modernist masterpiece, the poem is glorious to read aloud but sometimes elusive in its meaning – Eliot himself described the work as a ‘drama of literary anguish’. The character of Prufrock is a tragi-comic hero (or perhaps anti-hero) and, as readers, we work at untangling the literal from the symbolic to understand what it is he wants to say.