This event is free and open to the public and refreshments will be served.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Marjorie Perloff is a prolific and groundbreaking scholar. She has written more than a dozen books, including works on the poets W.B. Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara, and on post-modern literature and art. A recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Prize, Dr. Perloff is Scholar-in-Residence and Florence Scott Professor of English, Emerita at USC, and Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita at Stanford University. She is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Perloff is a Chapman University Presidential Fellow and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Chapman University in May 2015. Dr. Perloff donated her personal library to the Chapman University Leatherby Libraries in 2010.

About the Poem:

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally published poem by American-British poet T. S. Eliot. Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet (or chapbook) titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. 2017 is the 100th anniversary of one of the greatest poems in the English language, a poem that still so movingly speaks to us. Eliot’s poem was revolutionary in its own day and this lecture will explore why it is still “revolutionary.”