Eliot was only fifty-eight when he sees himself as an old man who lacks resilience for fresh adaptation. There was a physical reason: his hernia, which had been repaired at nineteen, now needed repair again. Age, though, is an old excuse. ‘I grow old … I grow old …’ Prufrock says to himself as he goes among the women. It’s a weary voice Eliot invented when he was twenty-one. In 1947, he creates a man ‘meeting himself as a stranger face to face’. Instead of the poet’s encounter with his timeless self in the Quartets, he meets a victim of time: a crumpling man. Eliot wants to convince Emily that ‘while I still love you … as much as ever, it is this previously unknown man whom I … will have to get to know’.
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