Eliot's Life Reflected Towards His Poetry
T.S. Eliot composed poems from within his experiences, physical or mental conditions and his own social observations. To fully comprehend Eliot’s work, we must first understand what he has gone through at specific times in his life. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” becomes a great example of were we must primarily understand what has happened to Eliot. “There can be no simple equation between the experiences of the life and the poetry”(Scofield 18). Eliot’s poetry became a reflection of himself, and this is especially noticeable with his poem, “Prufrock.”
According to Scofield, Eliot became a victim from acute anxiety and depression in the earlier part of his life (17). This could have been due to Eliot’s failed marriage. Scofield also describes Eliot as having an unstable life. He states that Eliot “took a leave of absence (…) on an account of an illness described as ‘nervous breakdown’”(17). The poem “Prufrock,” is based on male anxiety and insecurity, possibly experienced by Eliot himself. Prufrock struggles with his anxiety, and through out the poem this can be seen by the way that he questions himself in lines thirty-eight to forty-one of “Prufrock”:
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and ‘Do I dare?
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-
[They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’]
This stanza shows how Prufrock worries about people judging him. Prufrock’s insecurity, which is based upon an image of Eliot’s own insecurity, plays a major role in the poem. By the time this poem was completed, Eliot was in his thirty’s. A man at that age, such as Eliot’s, fears of loosing his ha...
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...scenery; he also gives an atmosphere. In lines fifteen and sixteen of “Prufrock”, Eliot describes the air that Prufrock breathes in the poem as being contaminated with gases and smoke. It says:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Such images as these are like those seen by Eliot when he once lived in St. Louis. Due to Eliot’s obsession with certain scenery and negative outlooks on life, he is able to project moods into his work.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a reflection of Eliot’s life in almost everyway. Everything that Eliot was going through, such as a bad marriage, anxiety and depression, and his observations of city life, have been echoed in his poem “Prufrock.” Therefore, I believe that it is Eliot who walks in the streets of “Prufrock,” and not Prufrock himself.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a dramatic monologue. In the same vein as Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”, this poem is represents modernity – it can be considered a modern metaphysical poem – and a long for the past. This is especially suggested through the use of allusions in the poem. The title is ironic, as the poem is not, nor is it similar to, a love song. J. Alfred Prufrock is additionally ironic in that it is an anti-heroic name that can be considered an amalgamation of the words ‘prude’ and ‘frock’ – frock being a pastor’s wear. The narrator, presumably the eponymous J. Alfred Prufrock, is a complex man who, through this ‘love song’, discusses the things he sees as he attends what is seemingly a party. This essay analyses two poetic techniques that show Prufrock to be intelligent, frightened, and lacking self-esteem. These traits are shown through the use of metaphor and metonyms, and allusions.
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.
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.
T.S. Eliot’s breakthrough poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is expertly crafted to have a complex structure with various hidden themes. The poem acts as an inner monologue for the titular character, appearing as lyric-narrative poetry. However, it does appear to lean towards a lyric poem, with the hazy plot consisting of Prufrock describing what his life has been like, in retrospect to speculating on what is to come next. The monologue throughout is melancholy in nature, with Prufrock dwelling on issues such as unrequited love, his frail body, his looming demise, and a dissatisfaction with the modernist world. Eliot uses a variety of metaphor within the poem to showcase Prufrock’s indecision, between being unable to fully live, while
How does T.S. Eliot portray Prufrock’s crippling social anxiety in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’?
Eliot paints a picture of the opening scene that depicts a drab neighborhood of cheap hotels and restaurants where Prufrock lives in his solitary gloom. He invites the reader to make a visit with him to a place that Prufrock imagines is filled with women having tea and engaging in conversation. Prufrock procrastinates on the visit and says, 'There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet:'; (lines 26-27) indicating to the reader that he is afraid of showing his real self to these participants. He further indicates his hesitation by stating, 'Time for you and ...
"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.
Prufrock’s social world is initially revealed as he takes the reader on a journey. Through the lines 1-36, the reader travels with Prufrock through the modern city and its streets as we experience Prufrock’s life and explore his surroundings through his eyes. From the very beginning, the city is portrayed as bleak and empty with no signs of happiness. The setting as Prufrock walks through the street appears to be polluted, dirty, and run-down, as if it is the cheap side of town, giving the feeling of it being lifeless, still, eerie, sleepy and unconscious. Eliot uses imagery, from the skyline to half-deserted streets, to cheap hotels to sawdust restaurants to demonstrate the loneliness and alienation the city possesses. The city Prufrock resides in is, in a way, a shadow of how he is as a person, and the images of the city speak to some part of his personality. Just as the skyline is described as “a patient etherised upon a table” (3), it foreshadows and hints that Prufrock has an...
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
This powerful image of the fog that encircles the house immediately makes a sense of conflicting elements in Prufrock, the fog as an object Eliot treated it as in his thecery as the objective correlative, the fog is no doubt is a mode of the urban blight caused by coal. Yet such feelings is double effects of interpretations that comes to prufrock, the poem juxtaposes the outside settings with the inside, saloon, drawing rooms compared to the landscape which is full with smoke and fog that curbs and made prufrock go to sleep. Such juxtaposition maintains the conflict inside prufrock and stops him from taking any vital decision
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...
T.S Eliot, widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern poetry, has written many great poems. Among the most well known of these are “The Waste Land, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which share similar messages, but are also quite different. In both poems, Eliot uses various poetic techniques to convey themes of repression, alienation, and a general breakdown in western society. Some of the best techniques to examine are ones such as theme, structure, imagery and language, which all figure prominently in his poetry. These techniques in particular are used by Eliot to both enhance and support the purpose of his poems.
The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot, is the story of the life of a man. It tells of a man reminiscing over his life, regretting decisions that he made. Of a man who is thinking back on his life, and toward the end, it is told how the man is closely approaching death. He wants to be able to escape it, but alas, cannot, and, in the end, he dies. In The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot expresses a sense of regret using literary devices, such as imagery, metaphors, and allusion.
T.S. Eliot was a poet, dramatist and he was also a literary critic. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The...
T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" reveals the unvoiced inner thoughts of a disillusioned, lonely, insecure, and self-loathing middle-aged man. The thoughts are presented in a free association, or stream of consciousness style, creating images from which the reader can gain insight into Mr. Prufrock's character. Mr. Prufrock is disillusioned and disassociated with society, yet he is filled with longing for love, comfort, and companionship. He is self-conscious and fearful of his image as viewed through the world's eye, a perspective from which he develops his own feelings of insignificance and disgust. T. S. Eliot uses very specific imagery to build a portrait of Mr. Prufrock, believing that mental images provide insight where words fail.