The irresistible paradox of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is its gritty transcendence. It is grounded but out of body, a free-floating passage through a quotidian life with all its tedium and worries (baldness, aging, misunderstanding), as well as its elusive pleasures (flirting, art, peaches). With sad humor, it both acknowledges […]