Assignment 7

T. S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (pp. 595- 99)

Eliot’s unusual techniques–an elliptical style studded with phrases in foreign languages, quotations from and allusions to many esoteric writers, the shear erudition of the poetry–all influenced virtually every British and American poet since the 1920s. Indeed, some literary historians maintain that much of the difficulty of modernist poetry may be largely the result of Eliot's influence. Reading his poetry is not easy, but those willing to make the intellectual effort will be rewarded accordingly.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has a dry, ironic tone that catches precisely the mood of vacillation, weakness, sordidness, and despair of much modern culture. Note the many ironies of the title, including the name of the speaker. Some critics have suggested it is possible to extract from the poem a concealed narrative. Others, because of the inscrutable nature of the narrator, reject any such narrative and suggest the poem is merely an interminable self-debate between the desire to live fully and the compulsion to conform to a social milieu. In any case, the poem reflects the indeterminate nature of much twentieth century literature.

Basically the poem is a fragmentary and often seemingly incoherent soliloquy of an alarmingly inhibited, indecisive, middle-aged failure as he walks the sordid streets in the dreary evening, contemplating the possibility of visiting a woman. He refers to the trivial conversation of teatime gossip (line 13); talks about the fog (15 ff); makes a digression on time (23 ff); goes on about his self-consciousness and hesitations (37 ff); discusses the voices, eyes, and arms of women (49 ff); ironically compares himself to John the Baptist (82), Lazarus (94 ff), Hamlet (111 ff); comments on his advancing age and whether he dare dress in the latest fashions (120 ff), until he concludes his soliloquy with a vision of loveliness (124 ff), but is suddenly jolted into despair in the very last line.

Metaphor and symbol replace direct statement--associations are psychological rather than grammatical; also note the interweaving of references, apparently random transitions, and rhetorical and poetic flights interrupted by *bathos and irrelevance. Part of the poem's irony is the inconsequential nature of Prufrock's situation (his reluctance for example to come to a decision about anything) which has him paralyzed with fear, afraid to disturb the universe of toast and tea. The dominant *tone of the poem, the images Prufrock uses, and the climax of the poem project unmistakable feelings about Prufrock and the social world he inhabits, a world of cakes and ices, novels and coffee spoons that is “drowned” by the stultifying social conventions in which it is immersed.