T.S. Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" perfectly captures the essence of a middle-aged man's insecurities, and Eliot wrote it when he was 23.
I recently reread Christopher Alexander's foreword to "Patterns of Software" and remembered his mention of this poem. He asks, with something that could be called optimism:
"Can you write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's The Waves?"
Eliot is amazing; folks who love his work do themselves a disservice, however, if they aren't also reading Ezra Pound ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound ) for a very different perspective on most of the same inspirations that made Eliot's early work so powerful.
