For an Iranian American kid growing up in the rural South, the poem’s divided self was strangely recognizable. Alfred Prufrock” when I first read it in high school-the paralyzing self-consciousness, the anxieties about sex and the social world. Jahan Ramazani: Like many adolescents, I saw myself in “The Love Song of J. (As I write this, Eliot is peering at me beadily from under the handle of his umbrella, on the cover of John Haffenden’s newest installment of his letters). The line: ‘(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)’, with its beckoning brackets, seemed even more intimate, ironically enough, since I was reading it in the hope of reaching someone doubly absent. He was away for the weekend at home when I discovered Eliot, and I remember being hooked by the first lines, as though they were addressed to me.
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