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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

T. S. Eliot, musical poet, Prufrock, music

College

Fine Arts and Communications

Department

Music

Abstract

French composer Francis Poulenc said “The setting to music of a poem must be an act of love, never a marriage of convenience.”1 As I searched for a thesis topic, it was ultimately love for T. S. Eliot’s work that led me to create these musical settings of his text. I have loved Eliot since I was in second grade, when my oldest brother Kenneth memorized T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He recited it for me, and though I did not understand exactly what the poem meant, I was immediately captivated by the mood it set, and by the rhythms and cadences of the words. I looked up the poem in an anthology, and then read all the other Eliot poems I could find. I read two volumes of Eliot’s letters. I read several of his essays. Again, even when the meanings escaped me, I loved to repeat the resonant phrases. The poems were full of voices, “voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a further room,” “voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells,” “voices / in the wind’s singing / more distant and more solemn / than a fading star.”

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