June 2015 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of T.S. Eliot's modernist classic "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Upon publication, readers were baffled by Eliot's vers libre and its hero, Prufrock, an uptight New England flaneur (one might say). But the poem seemed to capture the neurotic notes of the end of the Edwardian era and the beginning of the machine age. A century after its appearance, Prufrock continues to inspire new presentations of the work including John Craton's musical setting of the poem for tenor and piano. In Montreal, graphic artist Julian Peters is publishing an illustrated version of the text.

In 2014, Penn Libraries was gifted the Erwin K and Carol Welsch T.S. Eliot Collection. Erwin Welsch spent fifty years amassing his Eliot collection. He used as his guide Donald Gallup's definitive descriptive bibliography of the works of T.S. Eliot. It is an amazing collection. Virtually all the materials in the exhibit are selected from the Welsch collection.