A hundred years ago, one of my favorite poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, was published in the June, 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.

While the poem has now become quite influential in the world of modern poetry, its significance was initially overlooked by critics. In London on June 21, 1917, The Times Literary Supplement printed the following unsigned review:

“The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest im...