Texan and Atheist

[thesummerqueen]

Wow. An AP high school course that covered existentialism. Wish I could have gone somewhere like that. I took AP English but don't remember anything about existentialism. Had to go to college to get introduced. Stupid South Carolina (home state). I didn't really think people considered Prufrock as a necessarily existentialism poem, but I can very well see how they might. I knew there was a reason that I came to love it. Same "something" I suppose that makes me want to read "The Stranger," "Notes from the Underground" and other works over and over.

I agree about the role of religion today. As the line goes, Beethoven's music and Shakespeare's works don't prove God exists, only that Beethoven and Shakespeare existed.

It was an IB class, not AP, and therein lay the difference I think. IB seemed to be a little more all-encompassing with its subject matter. This was up in Northern VA, at one of "Time Magazine's Schools of the Year" (the only good thing about Stonewall Jackson High in Manassas was that it sported the same colors as the Redskins), so that might have been another reason - every one of my schools from Elementary up was some sort of 'pilot' with some program.

We studied several of Eliot's poems, but started with Prufrock, and...well...love at first read. That particular one's been a mixed bag of comfort, solace, and inspiration.