Congratulations on your teenage feat of memory! I was always terrible at such recitations. Prufrock is (or was to me, anyway) the ultimate expression of teen angst and uncertainty, notwithstanding its allusions to aging. Maybe I'll come back to it years from now when peaches start giving me problems and current trouser styles seem unnervingly unfamiliar.

As for Eliot's representation in the halls of academia, I can assure you that he figured prominently in Helen Vendler's American Poetry class at Harvard when I was there (yikes) about a decade and a half ago.

Frances Yates wrote a book on the subject which is mind-blowing to say the least - "The Art of Memory"

My recollection of the particulars had me doing a search on my name and the word "memory" (such an ineffible thing)

here are some paragraphs from an essay I wrote about six years ago that is still online somewhere. Anyway, I believe I used that to remember the whole poem without really intending too, though it became of great necessity to do so.

www.mud.co.uk/dvw/mudsmem...smorals.html

"Without the advent of cue cards or note paper, Greek orators used what Frances Yates refers to as "the art of memory," The referential place for such a concept, resides in the mental architecture of the individual mind. The original concept of a "mental architecture" is credited to Simonides of Ceos (556- 486 bce), a Greek poet who accessed his own internal memory system to help identify a room full of dead bodies. As a guest who escaped a collapsed dining hall, he returned only to help identify the mangled corpses of the those he had been dining with that evening. He did this by means of creating an internal mnemonic system whereby he was able to recall who was sitting where at the table. Although he did this long before the disaster, he was able to recall where everyone had been sitting and what their names were.

Thus, the advent of the "memory theater" was born and ascended through time as the use of a major mnemotechnic devise that would transmute its self- referential purpose through the ages, politics, and development of mass communications. Assimilated by Roman culture, the art of memory was used as a great oratory device whereby the speaker often attached key phrases as pictured words, to various crevices and portals in his own villa. During the speech, he could mentally rerun a slow and attentive journey through his own villa, and recall all the details of its carefully constructed mnemonic architecture. For instance, perhaps a highly important key phrase in his speech could be attached mentally to an image of a portal, thus emphasizing light and enlightenment.

Taken from the originating period of Simonides, whereby memory theaters were used my poets, orators, and as an aid in the memorization of long lists of items, the evolution of the concept remained dynamic and adaptable even beyond more widespread literacy and the eventual genesis of the Johannes Gutenberg's printing press . There were those who tried to use the memory theater as a modeled attempt to grasp the mysteries of religion and the universe. Giordanno Bruno, of the 16th Century, was burned at the state for heresy against the Roman Catholic church. Accused of propagating the black art of Hermeticism , that was feared for its occult application in one man's attempt to find out more than what was commonly dictated by the Church in regards to religion and destiny. Needless to say, his memory system was an elaborate project which took a life-time of dedication and resulted in a horrible death."

When i were high schooler...
I carried Eliot in my back pocket.
If I'd been shot in the ass,
I might escape
A crippling injury.
The book was thin though
And not enough to deflect
The blows of growing from
Child to man.
Still, I never thought
Of Eliot as young.
He was always old
To me, predicting
A future imagined:
Narrow and Dim.

I did eat the peach
And it was sweet:
Better than the apple.