Portrait of a Lady

“Portrait of a Lady” is an early poem by renowned English American poet T. S. Eliot. Completed in the first years after he graduated from Harvard, it was published in the literary magazine Others in September 1915 and was included in Eliot’s first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917).

The poem describes interactions between a young man and a much older woman who wants to befriend him. However, the young man feels strained and awkward at their meetings and they never manage to connect in a meaningful way, despite the woman’s efforts. The poem is autobiographical: The young man is based on Eliot himself, and the older woman, according to Eliot’s wife Valerie Eliot, is a version of Adeleine Moffat, a woman of means who lived in Boston and liked to invite selected Harvard undergraduates to tea.

Often described as a companion poem to the better-known “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which depicts the empty life of a middle-aged man, “Portrait of a Lady” shows a young man’s difficulty in forming an authentic relationship with a needy woman and in dealing with his own feelings about it.

Poet Biography

Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and editor Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St.