T.S. Eliot famously said, “April is the cruellest month.” Forget the word “cruellest,” which is underlined in red when I type it and would get your 12-year-old a B- on her middle-school English assignment, Eliot was just wrong about April. And any month in which you had to read Eliot was cruel.

Here are the opening lines of one of Eliot’s masterworks, one of the poems that won him a place in the pantheon of English literature: “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table.” These are the opening lines of “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which I was required to spend two days examining and discussing during my second year of college. Somebody owes me two days.