T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” and Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” were considered the traditional love songs in two different spheres. Despite the traditional scope of “Prufrock”, Loy’s “love Song” ignores poetic convention and respecting for form and rhyme. Regarding the Futurist focus on new ideas and rejection of traditional principles, Loy began using Futurist aesthetics to explore her preferred, but socially taboo, subjects: female sexuality. Through this poem, Loy struggles to expose social truths through new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new poetic forms. Readers of Loy’s “Songs” can embrace both her sexual and linguistic passion. In doing so, they also realize and embrace their own passions. Loy empowers today’s …show more content…
“Prufrock’s inability to express himself to women is considered as a direct consequence of his consistent identity-relation to the masculine symbols of his era, suggesting a set of tropes he always compares himself to. The literary characters of “Prufrock’s past ban his present, but the voice of ‘Songs’ reacts violently to these interventions of tradition on her life. For Loy, the traditions of the past have arranged gender-imbalanced attitudes, especially toward sex. Loy’s allusion to the Parable of the Ten Virgins from Matthew 25 contrasts the social expectations for the genders: her lover is encouraged by his culture to root for sexual pleasure. In ‘Love Songs’, vocabularies of science and rationality cohabit antagonistically with vocabularies of love and sentiment. The extreme abstraction of the language is inappropriate, to Loy, and one of her responses is to raise precise scientific language as an attempt to recover open expression in love poetry. She invokes psychological terminology to ironize the uniqueness of her relationship to …show more content…
The female as subject appears sparsely within “Prufrock”.There are no specific voices to provide insight or analysis of Michelangelo’s works, there are only some women, easily replaced by any other women who engage in the same activity, flitting in and out of rooms. They remain a nameless and faceless group throughout “Prufrock”, and their “coming and going” confirms their transitory status. Eliot’s treatment of a potential lover in “Prufrock” is mirrored by Loy’s reflections on her former lover in ‘Songs’. Both of these poems dismembering their lovers is significant. Instead of metaphors for the lover’s identities, each speaker concentrates on a part of the body and its effect on them. Loy uses her lover’s genitals as metonym, while Eliot allows his polite masculine gaze to drift to socially acceptable points of focus. Loy’s “Spawn of Fantasies” is commentary on culture and language as well as the relationships that are effected by them. She represents a disintegrated relationship to criticize the influence of the past, and leaves a peculiar record of love in a time of extreme personal and political instability. “Prufrock”, addressing subject of identity and language through Eliot’s traditional lens, highlights the problem of self-consciousness in the reflective literary man while mocking it all the
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is about a timid and downcast man in search of meaning, of love, and in search of something to break from the dullness and superficiality which he feels his life to be. Eliot lets us into Prufrock's world for an evening, and traces his progression of emotion from timidity, and, ultimately, to despair of life. He searches for meaning and acceptance by the love of a woman, but falls miserably because of his lack of self-assurance. Prufrock is a man for whom, it seems, everything goes wrong, and for whom there are no happy allowances. The emptiness and shallowness of Prufrock's "universe" and of Prufrock himself are evident from the very beginning of the poem. He cannot find it in himself to tell the woman what he really feels, and when he tries to tell her, it comes out in a mess. At the end of the poem, he realizes that he has no big role in life.
Corso spent much of his early life between foster parents and prison, the latter being where he was introduced to poetry. Now credited as a key member of the “Beat Generation”, a group of poets who were opposed to social conformity and the traditional forms of poetry, Corso typically wrote poetry “on serious philosophical issues” (Olson 53). On the other hand, Eliot’s upbringing was more traditional, where he attended Harvard and went on to become a figure of immense influence in the literary world. Eliot’s first major poetic publication, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, bears many resemblances to Corso’s postmodern poem Marriage, a poem written to criticize the philosophical issues associated with marriage. To begin with, Corso’s Marriage opens with two rhetorical questions that the speaker attempts to answer throughout the course of the poem.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” tells the speaker’s story through several literary devices, allowing the reader to analyze the poem through symbolism, character qualities, and allusions that the work displays. In this way, the reader clearly sees the hopelessness and apathy that the speaker has towards his future. John Steven Childs sums it up well in saying Prufrock’s “chronic indecision blocks him from some important action” (Childs). Each literary device- symbolism, character, and allusion- supports this description. Ultimately, the premise of the poem is Prufrock second guessing himself to no end over talking to a woman, but this issue represents all forms of insecurity and inactivity.
Eliot, T.S.. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 1996. 2459-2463.
From the beginning, Prufrock had a dream and starts off describing the setting of his dream. “When the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table” (Eliot, line 2-3). He wants to escape with a woman, with a lover. He talks about wanting to be like his idol, Michelangelo, a man he thinks is perfect and has all of the women’s attention. “In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo” (line 13-14). He wants to live a social life of wealth, but doesn’t know where to begin. He tried to enter that world he longs for, but it doesn’t turn out well. Then, he decides to go back to his closed off life, something he recognized and was used to.
T.S. Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. His poem“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is different and unusual. He rejects the logic connection, thus, his poems lack logic interpretation. He himself justifies himself by saying: he wrote it to want it to be difficult. The dissociation of sensibility, on the contrary, arouses the emotion of readers immediately. This poem contains Prufrock’ s love affairs. But it is more than that. It is actually only the narration of Prufrock, a middle-aged man, and a romantic aesthete , who is bored with his meaningless life and driven to despair because he wished but
In conclusion, after exploring the theme of this poem and reading it for myself, Eliot has created this persona, in industrialised England or somewhere else. A man of low self-esteem, you embark his journey as he struggles with a rational fear of being rejected by a woman. Which gives the reader sympathy to Prufrock, as he lives within his own personal
The poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” written by T.S. Eliot is a depiction of sadness and a disillusioned narrator. While reading this poem, one senses that the narrator is disturbed and has maybe given up hope, and that he feels he is just an actor in a tedious drama At the very beginning of the poem, Eliot uses a quote from Dante’s “Inferno”, preparing the poem’s reader to expect a vision of hell. This device seems to ask the reader to accept that what they are about to be told by the poem’s narrator was not supposed to be revealed to the living world, as Dante was exposed to horrors in the Inferno that were not supposed to be revealed to the world of the living. This comparison is frightening and intriguing, and casts a shadow on the poem and its narrator before it has even begun. J. Alfred Prufrock is anxious, self-concsious, and depressed.
It is not hard to see the love that that J. Alfred Prufrock has for a women in T.S. Eliots poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Specifically, he uses vivid descriptions to show his desire for her. With each stanza describing a different illusion, but each showing his tremendous love her. Three allusions stood out to me because they showed that nothing else in the world mattered except her. Although there are many allusions, three stood out among the rest, because of there way of making the reader feel about that one person that makes them feel the same as J. Alfred Prufrock.
As the practice of homosexual love became more widespread, poetry became more erotic, celebrating beautiful boys. A similar erotic theme was then seen in the homoerotic “friendships” developed between mal...
In the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T. S. Elliot uses a vast amount of symbolism to depict the fantasy feelings of his character. Of the many he chooses, I feel the epigraph is the most important in setting the overall feeling of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Through the use of stream of consciousness, visceral imagery, and unconventional rhyming pattern, Eliot imbues readers with longing and frustration, and an awareness of mortality deploying lines that become deceptive musings in “Prufrock”.
Love is one of the main sources that move the world, and poetry is not an exception, this shows completely the feelings of someone. In “Litany” written by Billy Collins, “Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims, “Song” by John Donne, “Love” by Matthew Dickman and “Last Night” by Sharon Olds navigate around the same theme. Nevertheless, they differ in formats and figurative language that would be compared. For this reason, the rhetoric figures used in the poems will conduct us to understand the insights thought of the authors and the arguments they want to support.
TS Elliot is very methodical about the craft and meaning of his poem: “The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock.” Through a plethora of literary devices, TS Elliot portrays a question that J. Alfred Prufrock never asked, through this unasked Question Elliot portrayed Prufrock as desperate to find a female partner to have a relationship with. Elliot starts The Poem out by making an invitation saying “Let us go then, you and I” - to whom? : it remains unclear.
Riquelme chiefly discusses an identity complication within “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. First, he compares how the usage of general pronouns in a conventional dramatic monologue differs from the way Prufrock utilizes them. Normally, the listener is unknown, but Eliot makes it unclear whether the reader is being directly or indirectly addressed. The ambiguity among the pronouns “you” and “I” reflects Riquelme’s puzzlement because he deems that the “reader and viewer both stand inside and outside the frame of an illusion that cannot be sustained”. Later in his criticism, Riquelme references Dante’s epigraphs that appear before and after “Prufrock” to support his statement regarding the perplexity of the character of Eliot’s