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new demands of self-presentation.

While poets of the previous century had

wandered lonely as a cloud through the

countryside (Wordsworth, in 1802) or

repaired in solitude to Walden Pond

(Thoreau, in 1845), Eliot’s Prufrock

mostly worries about being looked at

by “eyes that fix you in a formulated

phrase” and pin you, wriggling, to a

wall.

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Fast-forward nearly a hundred years,

and Prufrock’s protest is enshrined in

high school syllabi, where it’s dutifully

memorized, then quickly forgotten, by

teens increasingly skilled at shaping

their own online and offline personae.

These students inhabit a world in which

status, income, and self-esteem depend

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