THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1965) was born into a prosperous Midwestern family, Eliot attended Harvard (with e .e. comings) and then went on to study at oxford . Although born an American,  Eliot  married an Englishwoman, gave up his American citizenship, and lived most of his life in London.

Eliot made his living as a teacher, a banker , and an influential literary critic. He popularized the modernist style of thinking  and writing. In fiction, modernism was represented by the stark realism of such writers as Ernest Hemingway, but in poetry this new sensibility was quite different. The imagists, including  Eliot’s close friend and fellow poet, Ezra pound, believed in the motto, “no ideas but in things,” in other words, the image is most important, the meaning secondary. Modernists embraced free verse ( on regular rhyme scheme or meter ) and freedom of thought (often their writing questioned accepted ideas and social norms) . This anti traditional and loos of humanity during the war accelerated the popularization of modernism. The war caused many people to reexamine their previous beliefs in religion and the innate goods of humankind, and one radical branch of modernism, known as Dada, claimed that the only legitimate emotion left was disgust .

T. S . Eliot, though, was not a Dadaist. He retained his protestant faith (and became an elder in the Anglican church in his later years),and while his poetry shows sadness for what has been lost and bitterness toward the modern world, it also works to shows the dignity that people can achieve and maintain in the fast of disaster. Eliot believed that one generation bears the great responsibility to pass along to the next generation the best of art and ideas.

 At first reading this great poem may strike one as a mixture of evocative but disjoint fragments. The difficulty in sorting out the central point of the poem lies in Eliot’s use of what Hugh Kenner in the individualized speaker. Eliot makes a number of breaks with the tradition of the dramatic monologue used by browning, but at the same time draws on some of its familiar devices. Prufrock is being presented as a mentally enervated, middle-aged, frustrated man thinking about his present life and the current state of the world, and carving his thoughts into the from of a love song …..he comes across more as an atmosphere, a consciousness, that as a character or a personality. He seems in a way to be group of thoughts connected in mood and rhythm though not by narrative thread or an underlying personality …….

For Eliot, from is the largest difficulty facing the modern poet, who must find “a way of controlling. Of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”(Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and myth”). this sense that the modern world defies traditional structure and that the poet must somehow find  way of creating order amid chaos is a driving force in Eliot’s work, and each poem can be seen as offering a distinct solution to the problem of form.   

Structurally, “ the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a dramatic monologue loosely bound together with a rambling psychological consciousness which makes him hesitant to “dare or disturb the universe ” (  presumably by instigating-

Conversation and  or a relationship with a woman), consoling himself with the though that “[t] here will be time, there will be time.” While “Prufrock” is widely recognized as the most brilliant of Eliot’s early poem --J.C.C. Mays claims that it “dominates the 1917 volume in  which it appears” -- it is also one of the most approachable of his poem since structurally it takes fewer risks than his later poem. As an internal dramatic monologue it is part of a long-standing tradition, and although it modifies the tradition by incorporating a more disjunctive narrative structure and a heavy reliance on allusion, which highlights the ironic contrast between past glories and modern inadequacy, it still remains squarely within that tradition. The poem’s value doesn’t lie in its structural innovation so much as in the fact that its themes --the disintegration of the modern world, “the tone of the effort and futility of effort which is central in Eliot’s writing,” the failure to act, to “disturb the universe, “as Prufrock puts it -- were to preoccupy Eliot throughout his career.