Langdon Hammer's Modern Poetry lecture at Yale (ENGL 310) turns to T.S. Eliot's early work. Hammer opens by contrasting Eliot with Ezra Pound, arguing that where Pound's method centers on translation, Eliot's centers on quotation, a distinction he traces through Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and its claim that a poet writes in constant relation to a literary past. The lecture then moves to a close reading of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," tracking how the poem breaks from traditional verse forms and how its fragmented structure mirrors the speaker's fractured self-consciousness. Chapters move from the theory of quotation, through a biographical and intellectual introduction to Eliot, to the sustained reading of Prufrock itself. Recorded in spring 2007 as part of Yale's Open Yale Courses series, the talk is lecture-hall footage of Hammer speaking directly to students with no supplementary graphics.