Why I don't like T.S.Eliot

Eliot's first published poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, or at least I've always assumed so -- here are the first twelve lines:

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

When I made time for re-reading Eliot, sometime in China, I didn't get past these lines, particularly the last couplet: I still can't find a way of making the rhyme of is it and visit sound anything other than clumsy.

One poet - Ted Hughes? - said something like writing poetry was simply putting all the right words in all the right places, and that if a poem came up against a block, a problem, where there were no possible "right words", the best thing to do was to stop, and start again. Eliot should have started again. Or stuck to his day job. In a bank, right? T. Stearns E. Another subject; here just the poetry.

But I started thinking about this poem again recently, after @girlbeforemirror asked me something about poetry, and I found more problems.

The lines are made up of rhyming couplets, except for two:

Like a patient etherized upon a table

First, the meaning: what kind of depressive bullshit is this? There are plenty of photos of sunsets on Steemit, you don't need another one, but who ever saw this kind of an Eliot-evening? I don't think there's need to say more, no need to dwell on the negative.

And then secondly the length of the line is longer, and it has started to look to me as if this, and the second unpartnered line, were inserted after the first draft.

The second line:

To lead you to an overwhelming question….

Again, this line is longer, but there is something else. Another of my earlier problems with Eliot was that he never directly identified this question. Perhaps he did, and I have just not noticed, but The Waste Line, groaning under footnotes, has not one to Hamlet. The "overwhelming question"? "To be, or not to be .."

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

The first twelve lines again, although this time ten.

This time the depressive feeling is from the poverty of Prufrock walking the lonely streets, before returned to his hotel for frustrating and guilty masturbation, and is not linking to the whole fracking evening. That's a plus. But the removal of the second line changes the object of "tedious argument" and "insidious intent" from the journey to the question to the question itself.

Bingo!

To be, or not to be is insidious, even allowing for Hamlet being barking mad, trying for perfection.

The question
has never been
to be or not to be:

The human question,
spoken quietly
to the evening sky,

humbly asks:
how to be?