These annotations were taken directly from B.C. Southam's A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot.

Dedication: Dedicated to Jean Verdenal, a friend of Eliot's who was killed in 1915 on the Anglo-French expedition to the Dardanelles.

Title: Orginally titled "Prufrock Among the Women". "J. Alfred Prufrock" follows the early form of Eliot's signature "T. Stearns Eliot".

Epigraph: These lines are taken from Dante's "Inferno", and are spoken by the character of Count Guido da Montefelltro. Dante meets the punished Guido in the Eighth chasm of Hell. Guido explains that he is speaking freely to Dante only because he believes Dante is one of the dead who could never return to earth to report what he says. Translated from the original Italian, the lines are as follows: "If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy."

spread out:   This metaphor occurs many times in Bergson's "Time and Free Will (1910), the work which Eliot, while in Harvard, quoted from most frequently in his writings about Bergson.

overwhelming question:   In James Fenimore Cooper's "The Pioneers" (1823), a book Eliot loved as a child, a metaphorical "overwhelming question" occurs.

In the room the women come and go...Michelangelo:  Laforgue wrote: "In the room the women come and go/Talking of the masters of the Sienne school". Eliot imitates Laforgue, introducing an element of parody, set off as a kind of chorus (repeated later at lines 35-6) following a section of "vers libre" i.e. free verse. Michelangelo: great Italian sculptor, painter and poet.

fog:  According to Eliot, the smoke that blew across the Mississippi from the factories of St. Louis, his hometown.

And indeed there will be time:  Echoing "Had we but world enough and time", from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress". The speaker of the poem argues to his 'coy mistress' that they could take their time in courtship games only if they lived forever.

dying fall:  In Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" the lovesick Duke Orsino orders an encore of a moody piece of music: "That strain again! It had a dying fall".

sprawling on a pin:   In the study and collection of insects, specimens are pinned into place and kept in cases. Prufrock feels as though he is being brutally analyzed in a similar manner.

butt-ends:   As in the ends of smoked cigarettes.

Arms that are braceleted white and bare:  "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" in John Donne's "The Relic", a line with a "powerful effect" Eliot remarks upon in "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921).

Though I have seen my head...brought in upon a platter: Matthew 14:3-11, Mark 6:17-29 in the Bible; the death of John the Baptist. King Herod was enamored of a dancing girl named Salome. He offered her a gift of anything she wanted in his kingdom. Salome's mother told her to request the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. Herod complied.

Lazarus:   Another Biblical story. In Luke 16:19-31, a Lazarus is a beggar associated with a rich man named Dives in a parable. When they died Lazarus went to Heaven while Dives went to Hell. Dives wanted to warn his brothers about Hell and asked Abraham if Lazarus could be sent back to tell them. Abraham refused saying, "if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."

Prince Hamlet:   Probably Shakespeare's most famous character. The hero Hamlet, like Prufrock, is crippled by indecisiveness. Prufrock echoes Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" at the end of this line.

attendant lord:   Prufrock having an inferiority complex, stating that he will never be a main character with a purpose, like Hamlet, but rather an "attendant lord" (in this case Polonius), a side character who may slightly move the plot but is buffoonish, a fool (see below).

Fool:   Besides the common meaning, a standard character in Elizabethan drama, as in a court jester who entertains the nobility and speaks in seeming nonsense which contained paradoxical wisdom. Hamlet's court jester was Yorick ("Alas poor Yorick--I knew him Horatio..."). The fool was often also another character in the play, not a court jester, who was used as comic relief. In "Hamlet" it is the gravedigger; in "The Merchant of Venice" it is Launcelot Gobbo, in "Henry IV Part I and II" it is Falstaff, and so on.

Shall I part my hair behind?: At this time such a hairstyle was considered "daringly bohemian".