Artist Statement: Comic of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot was a poem that was instrumental in my conceptualization of poetry as an internal visual experience, an experience that I would later go on to attempt to externalize in pen and ink on paper.

I still remember my first encounter with the poem as a teenager in a college English lit. class. My teacher began extemporaneously reciting the poem to us from memory, and from the opening lines, I was seized by the vivid sensation of a whole atmospheric street scene unfurling itself before my mind’s eye—and the “magic lantern” slide show continued from there, through the catlike movements of the yellow fog, the formulating eyes in oppressive drawing rooms, and the sea-girls combing back the white hairs of a windswept sea. Although I didn’t hit upon the idea of adapting poetry into a comics format until many years later, the seed of the connection between poetry and a sequential visual narrative had been forever planted.

The poem is set in a nonspecified city, which many readers assume to be London, but my visual reference for the comic was Boston. Eliot spent the years leading up to the writing of “Prufrock” studying at Harvard, and the city seemed to me to possess the closest thing to the particular ambiguously “mid-Atlantic” atmosphere I was looking for.