THE LOVE SONG OF J ALFRED PURFROCK

T.S Eliot & Modern Poetry

Thomas Stearns Eliot (T.S Eliot (1888-1965) is an American-born writer, regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri as the youngest son in a large, prosperous, and distinguished family. Eliot's father was a successful businessman; his mother wrote prose and religious poetry. Eliot was educated at Milton Academy (a private boarding school outside of Boston, Massachusetts) and at Harvard University. He earned his undergraduate degree, after three years of study, in 1909. He then continued at Harvard, studying philosophy under George Santayana. Eliot received his M.A degree in philosophy in 1910, after which he studied literature and language at the Sorbonne in Paris, France; as a fellowship recipient in Germany; and at the University of Oxford in England.

After leaving Oxford, Eliot stayed in England. He became close friends with America poet Ezra Pound, who was also living abroad. Throughout the late 1920s and the 1930s Eliot wrote, lectured, and taught in Britain and the United States. In 1927 he became a British citizen and converted from the Unitarian church to the Church of England.

Eliot's earliest masterpiece, The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, was published in poetry magazine in 1915. Eliot earned international acclaim in 1922 with the publication of The Waste Land. This is a poem in five parts; it was ground breaking in establishing the form of the so-called fragmented, modern poem. Despite the fragmentation of form, The Waste Land is unified by its theme of despair. Its opening lines introduce the ideas of life's ultimate futility despite momentary flashes of hope. It is a devastating analysis of the society of his time. The Waste Land draws much of its symbolism and narrative framework from the mythological story of the quest for the Holy Grail, the sacred cup that Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper.

The poem The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock is written in free verse, since it doesn't have any set length or set rhyme scheme. It's kind of just like whatever Eliot felt like writing. This poem is an example of the masterpiece of his poetic apprenticeship (preparation). Like much of the poetry of Robert Browning, it is a dramatic monologue. Like the poetry of Jules Laforgue, it is a Symbolist poem that explores the narrator’s stream of consciousness as he relates, in fragmented fashion, his seemingly random thoughts that are unified by the structure of the poem. The poem marks the beginning of the modernist movement in Anglo-American poetry. It is the first English-language poem in the twentieth century to employ free verse, startling juxtapositions of allusion and situation, an intensely self-conscious speaker (or “persona”), and a truly urban setting. The initial quotation is from Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), the great fourteenth century epic describing the author’s descent into the Inferno and eventual ascent into Paradise. The lines (in Italian) are spoken by one of the damned souls to Dante as he journeys through Hell. Like souls in the Inferno, Prufrock exists in a kind of living death.

In the poem’s opening lines, Prufrock invites the reader to accompany him as he walks through a modern city making his social rounds. Perhaps he assumes that they share his comfortable wealth and socially active lifestyle. As his proper, even prissy, name implies, Prufrock is neurotic (anxious), fearful, sensitive, and bored. His upper-class friends—the women who “come and go”—apparently lead arid (dry) and pointless lives. At any rate, what is evident right from the outset of the poem is that Prufrock is unhappy with his life. His unhappiness, his suspects, has something to do with the society in which he lives: There is, for example, the jarring (irritating) clash between the grim (ugly) cityscape through which he walks and the mindless tea-party conversation of his friends.

One important way in which this poem is different from the poetry of the century before it is the way in which the speaker describes nature. In the nineteenth century, poets described the natural world as the real home of God, as the fountain at which weary human beings could refresh themselves. A nineteenth century poet, such as William Wordsworth, might have described the coming of evening as being “gentle, like a nun.” In contrast, Prufrock’s evening is like a very sick person awaiting an operation; the dusk over the city is anesthetized (frozen) and spread-eagled on an operating table. The urban images that follow this one are just as grim: Prufrock’s city, which is perhaps Eliot’s London, is a town of cheap hotels and bad restaurants. The streets appear sinister (evil); they seem to threaten the people walking in them, bullying them with pointed questions. The urban landscape is made even more ominous (gloomy) by a “yellow fog” that, catlike, “rubs” against windows and “licks” the “corners of the evening.”

As night falls and the fog settles in, Prufrock describes another landscape—this time, a temporal one where time stretches to infinity. He knows, however, that he will not be able to use this time to advantage; as usual, he will be indecisive (unsure). “There will be time” enough, he says, but only for “a hundred indecisions (uncertainties).”

Like the limitless streets outside his window, infinite time also threatens Prufrock. The more life he has left to live, the more he is left to wonder and to question. Wondering and questioning frighten him because the answers that they provoke might challenge the perfect, unchanging regularity of his tidy (fair/neat) existence. He knows that time is dangerous, that “In a minute there is time/ For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” Nothing, in other words, is as settled as it seems. Nothing that has happened to Prufrock in his life is particularly comforting: He would like his life to change, but at the same time he fears change and the unexpected events that change might bring. He feels as though he already knows everything that is bound to happen to him. He especially knows the kinds of people whom he is likely to continue meeting—socialites who pin him down with their critical scrutiny.

Yet something besides these general, abstract worries bothers Prufrock. His chronic (habitual) indecision blocks him from some important action. The reader never learns specifically what this spoilt act might be, but Prufrock seems to address a woman, perhaps one he loves. Their friends appear to gossip about them “among the porcelain (chinaware)” teacups. Prufrock implies, however, that the woman would reject him if he could ever gather his courage and tell her how he feels. He pictures her sitting in her genteel (proper) drawing room, explaining that she had not meant to encourage him: “That is not what I meant at all,” she tells him.

Prufrock knows, in any case, that he cannot be the hero of anyone’s story; he cannot be Hamlet (despite Hamlet’s similar bouts (fits) of indecision)—instead, he is only a bit player, even a Fool. He imagines himself growing old, unchanged, worrying about his health and the “risks” of eating a peach. Still, he faintly hears the mermaids of romance singing in his imagination, even though they are not singing to him. In a final imagined vision, he sees these nymphs of the sea, free and beautiful, calling him. Reality, however, intrudes in the form of “human voices,” perhaps those of the art-chattering women, and he is “drowned” in his empty life.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T.S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue, and marked the beginning of Eliot's career as an influential poet. With its weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, sense of decay, and awareness of mortality, Prufrock has become one of the most recognized voices in 20th century literature and is the quintessential urban zeitgeist of the 20th-century.

The poem presents the apparently random thoughts going through a person's head within a certain time interval, in which the transitional links are psychological rather than logical. On the surface, "The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" relays the thoughts of a sexually frustrated middle-aged man who wants to say something but is afraid to do so, and ultimately does not. The dispute, however, lies in to whom Prufrock is speaking, whether he is actually going anywhere, what he wants to say, and to what the various images refer.

The intended audience is not evident. Some believe that Prufrock is talking to another person or directly to the reader, while others believe Prufrock's monologue is internal. Similarly, critics dispute whether Prufrock is going somewhere during the course of the poem. In the first half of the poem, Prufrock uses various outdoor images (the sky, streets, cheap restaurants and hotels, fog), and talks about how there will be time for various things before the taking of toast and tea, and time to turn back and descend the stair. This has led many to believe that Prufrock is on his way to an afternoon tea, in which he is preparing to ask this overwhelming question. Others, however, believe that Prufrock is not physically going anywhere, but rather, is playing through it in his mind.

Perhaps the most significant dispute lies the overwhelming question that Prufrock is trying to ask. Many believe that Prufrock is trying to tell a woman of his romantic interest in her, pointing to the various images of woman's arms and clothing and the final few lines in which Prufrock laments that the mermaids will not sing to him. Others, however, believe that Prufrock is trying to express some deeper philosophical insight or disillusionment with society, but fears rejection, pointing to statement that express a disillusionment with society such as "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons". Many believe that the poem is a criticism of Edwardian society and Prufrock's dilemma represents the inability to live a meaningful existence in the modern world. For many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment.