Senior Students Publish Extensive Interpretation of T.S. Eliot Poem

A class of Regis seniors concluded a third trimester English elective by launching "Prufrock Unlimited", an online critical edition of T.S. Eliot's landmark poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The launch marked the culmination of a semester-long senior project intended to present an interpretation of the Eliot poem to the public at large, in the spirit of helping other students understand what is considered a rather difficult poem.

The project was a collaborative effort by ten students. The seniors formulated a group interpretation of the poem, a design for the website, and a consensus on the features to be included. Each student in the course took charge of a particular element – annotations, website programming, media, to name a few – and every student contributed to the written content.

This unique third trimester elective was taught by Mr. Justin Kiczek, member of the Regis English Department faculty. "The course was inspired by the growing field of Digital Humanities, which seeks to harness the powers of technology and the Internet to advance studies in literature, history, and philosophy," notes Kiczek. "The objective was to produce, by the semester’s end, a hyperlinked, scholarly edition of the poem, complete with annotations, critical essays, primary source documents, and audio and visual components. We hoped that our work would help other students who were coming across Eliot’s difficult but important poem for the first time."

Before setting to the work of designing the website, students came to understand modernism as both an artistic and historic response and to see Eliot as a central figure within this movement. The class spent weeks poring over the poem, line by line, trying to arrive at a consensus of interpretation. Only after carefully studying the poem did the students begin the process of developing materials and programming the website. Together, students decided upon the website’s name, design, format, organization, and structure. "I only served as a guide through the poem and as a manger of the project," says Kiczek. "The website itself is an entirely student-produced project."

The site has been made available using the following link: https://regis.org/prufrock/

Pictured: Regis students who participated in the publication of an online critical edition of T.S. Eliot's landmark poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."