This morning a patron came in for an old classic and said how interesting it is to re-read books that were read years ago, how their meaning can change, become more appreciated or less so. The same subject was in yesterday’s Bookends from the N Y Times Book Review. Adam Kirsch pondered how important T.S. Eliot had been to his introduction to poetry as a youth and how his feelings have changed. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock must be the most perfect expression of adolescent anguish ever written…even The Waste Land with its showy references and sexual dread, seems like a kind of young person’s performance. This is not to say that it is not as great a poem as ever, just that there may be different kinds of greatness, suited to different phases of our growth.”
