Archive Editor’s Note

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

Originally Published: August 21, 2024
"Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

Artist credit: Copyright Julian Peters 2016

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.

"Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table;"

Artist credit: Copyright Julian Peters 2016

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.

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown." 

Artist credit: Copyright Julian Peters 2016

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.   

"Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo."

Artist credit: Copyright Julian Peters 2016

"Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table;"
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Page 2

"Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo."
2/7
"The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,"
3/7
"Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."
4/7
"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown." 
5/7
"And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor – And this, and so much more? --"
6/7
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
7/7

Julian Peters is a comics artist and illustrator living in Montreal, Canada. He earned a master’s degree in art history from Concordia University with a thesis focusing on two early experimental graphic novels, Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti (1969) and Martin Vaughn-James’s The Projector (1971). His debut collection of adaptations of classic English-language poems into comics, Poems to See By: A Comic...

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