Modern Man in T. S. Eliot’s
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s poetry has been of great influence in revealing to man his real identity during the last fifty years. To Eliot, the modern man is no longer the best creature ever created by God. He is neither a being supreme in everything. Nor is he the all-knowing, the most determined, and the sociable creature one might think of. How is this modern man depicted in his poetry is a question that would take time and meticulous effort to be answered. Nevertheless some characteristics of man are more evident in his poetry: Man suffers an impoverishment of emotional vitality. He lives according to the rules of the empty social conventions and those of a decadent culture. Man’s life is partly sordid and sensual. He is to some extent aware of his isolation and footlessness. He feels himself entangled in a corrupt, decaying, Ugly Society. All of these features, however, could be categorized into three major groups. Each group, in turn, would show a series of subsidiary relating problems which would make a whole entity. The duplicity of Man, lack of communication among Men, and Man’s isolation are three basic predicaments of Man, making him more and more alienated. Although, these motifs are common to Eliot’s poetry the writer here tries to trace them in his “Love Song” (The Waste Land and Other Poems 12).
The sense of duplicity within the modern man is a major motif in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (12). In this poem the hero, Prufrock, is helplessly caught in an interminable quarrel between his own desire to live by himself and the obligation to submit to the social conventions. Eric Sigg in his book, The American T.S. Eliot,...
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· Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot. London: Mathuen and Co., Ltd, 1985.
· Lawerence, Karen, Seifter, Besty, and Ratner, Lois. The Mc Graw-Hill Guide to English Literature. 2 Vol. 4, USA: McGraw – Hill, Inc., 1985.2:321.
· Scofield, Martin. T.S. Eliot: The Poems. London Faber and Faber, 1994.
· Sigg, Eric. The American T.S. Eliot. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
· Sullivan, Sheila. Reading in Literary Criticism: Critics on T.S. Eliot. New Delhi: George Allen and Unwin Publishers, 1995.
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Despite the similarities between these two poems, Corso and Eliot shared little in common. 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 bares many resemblances to Corso’s postmodern poem Marriage, a poem written to criticize the philosophical issues associated with marriage.
Elliot, George, and Gordon Sherman. Haight. Selections from George Eliot's Letters. New Haven [Conn.: Yale UP, Print
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.
In his poem Eliot paints the picture of an insecure man looking for his niche in society. Prufrock has fallen in with the times, and places a lot of weight on social status and class to determine his identity. He is ashamed of his personal appearance and looks towards social advancement as a way to assure himself and those around him of his worth and establish who he is. Throughout the poem the reader comes to realize that Prufrock has actually all but given up on himself and now sees his balding head and realizes that he has wasted his life striving for an unattainable goal.
Garraty, John and Mark C. Carnes, eds. T.S Eliot’s life and Career. New York: Oxford University Press.1999. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/life.htm
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.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. ed. M. H. Abrams New York, London: Norton, 1993.
T.S. Eliot, a notable twentieth century poet, wrote often about the modern man and his incapacity to make decisive movements. In his work entitled, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'; he continues this theme allowing the reader to view the world as he sees it, a world of isolation and fear strangling the will of the modern man. The poem opens with a quoted passage from Dante's Inferno, an allusion to Dante's character who speaks from Hell only because he believes that the listener can not return to earth and thereby is impotent to act on the knowledge of his conversation. In his work, Eliot uses this quotation to foreshadow the idea that his character, Prufrock, is also trapped in a world he can not escape, the world where his own thoughts and feelings incapacitate and isolate him.
Eliot, T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Prufrock, and Other Observations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920. N. pag. Bartleby.com. Aug. 2011. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an ironic depiction of a man’s inability to take decisive action in a modern society that is void of meaningful human connection. The poem reinforces its central idea through the techniques of fragmentation, and through the use of Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world. Using a series of natural images, Eliot uses fragmentation to show Prufrock’s inability to act, as well as his fear of society. Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world is also evident throughout. At no point in the poem did Prufrock confess his love, even though it is called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, but through this poem, T.S. Eliot voices his social commentary about the world that Prufrock lives in.
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
Williamson, George. A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot; a Poem by Poem Analysis. New York:
Kenner, Hugh. T.S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962.
One of T.S. Eliot’s earliest poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is a prime example of a text that takes a turn inwards in terms of conveying the experience it presents. The poem provides a look into the distressed mind of an archetypal modern man of the times. It does this using the speaker’s stream of consciousness presented as a dramatic monologue. Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seeks to advance his relationship with a woman who has caught his eye. He wonders if he has “the strength to force the moment to its crisis” (Eliot, 80). Prufrock is so entrenched in self-doubt that he is uncertain whether he is capable of having a relationship with this woman. His knowledge of the world he lives in and his circumstances keep him from attempting to approach this prospective lover. He contemplates the reasons for which he believes he cannot be with her and scolds himself for even thinking that it was possibl...
For Eliot, poetic representation of a powerful female presence created difficulty in embodying the male. In order to do so, Eliot avoids envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies. We can see this process clearly in "The Love Song of J. Prufrock." The poem circles around not only an unarticulated question, as all readers agree, but also an unenvisioned center, the "one" whom Prufrock addresses. The poem never visualizes the woman with whom Prufrock imagines an encounter except in fragments and in plurals -- eyes, arms, skirts - synecdoches we might well imagine as fetishistic replacements. But even these synecdochic replacements are not clearly engendered. The braceleted arms and the skirts are specifically feminine, but the faces, the hands, the voices, the eyes are not. As if to displace the central human object it does not visualize, the poem projects images of the body onto the landscape (the sky, the streets, the fog), but these images, for all their marked intimation of sexuality, also avoid the designation of gender (the muttering retreats of restless nights, the fog that rubs, licks, and lingers). The most visually precise images in the poem are those of Prufrock himself, a Prufrock carefully composed – "My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, / My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin" -- only to be decomposed by the watching eyes of another into thin arms and legs, a balding head brought in upon a platter. Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock are themselves, as Pinkney observes, terrifyingly unstable, attributes constituting the identity of the subject at one moment only to be wielded by the objective the next, like the pin that centers his necktie and then pinions him to the wall or the arms that metamorphose into Prufrock's claws. The poem, in these