{"id":210,"date":"2019-05-07T06:43:37","date_gmt":"2019-05-07T06:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engp04.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=210"},"modified":"2019-05-08T04:18:27","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T04:18:27","slug":"t-s-eliot-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-other-poems","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/engp04\/chapter\/t-s-eliot-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-other-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock other Poems"},"content":{"raw":"
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T. S. Eliot Life<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 \u2013 4 January 1965), most commonly known as T.S Eliot, is a towering figure of the twentieth century who has taken up various roles in his literary career as an essayist, playwright, publisher as well as a literary and social critic in English literary field. Eliot was awarded the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 for his immense innovation and contribution to modern day poetry. When T. S. Eliot died, wrote Robert Giroux, \"the world became a lesser place.\" Certainly the most imposing poet of his time, Eliot was revered by Igor Stravinsky \"not only as a great sorcerer of words but as the very key keeper of the language.\" For Alfred Kazin he was \"the mana <\/em>known as 'T. S. Eliot,' the model poet of our time, the most cited poet and incarnation of literary correctness in the English-speaking world.\" Northrop Frye simply states: \"A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read.\"<\/p>\r\n \r\n

In 1945 Eliot wrote: \"A poet must take as his material his own language as it is actually spoken around him.\" Correlatively, the duty of the poet, as Eliot emphasized in a 1943 lecture, \"is only indirectly to the people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve.\" Thus he dismisses the so-called \"social function\" of poetry. The only \"method,\" Eliot once wrote, is \"to be very intelligent.\" As a result, his poetry \"has all the advantages of a\u00a0highly critical habit of mind,\" writes A. Alvarez; \"there is a coolness in the midst of involvement; he uses texts exactly for his own purpose; he is not carried away. Hence the completeness and inviolability of the poems. What he does in them can be taken no further.... [One gets] the impression that anything he turned his attention to he would perform with equal distinction.\" Alvarez believes that \"the strength of Eliot's intelligence lies in its training; it is the product of a perfectly orthodox academic education.\" But Jacques Maritain once told Marshall McLuhan that \"Eliot knows so much philosophy and theology that I do not see how he can write poetry at all.\" Eliot, however, never recognized a conflict between academic and creative pursuits.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Of \u00a0his \u00a0early \u00a0work, \u00a0Eliot \u00a0has \u00a0said: \u00a0\"The \u00a0form \u00a0in \u00a0which \u00a0I \u00a0began \u00a0to \u00a0write, \u00a0in \u00a01908 \u00a0or \u00a01909, \u00a0was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue together with the later Elizabethan drama; and I do not know anyone who started from exactly that point.\" Elsewhere he said: \"The kind of poetry that I needed, to teach me the use of my own voice, did not exist in English at all; it was only found \u00a0in \u00a0French,\" \u00a0and \u00a0Leonard \u00a0Unger \u00a0concludes \u00a0that, \u00a0\"insofar \u00a0as \u00a0Eliot \u00a0started \u00a0from \u00a0an exact point, <\/em>it \u00a0was \u00a0exclusively \u00a0and \u00a0emphatically \u00a0the \u00a0poetry \u00a0of \u00a0Laforgue.\" \u00a0To \u00a0a \u00a0lesser \u00a0extent, \u00a0he \u00a0was influenced by other Symbolists, by the metaphysical poets, by Donne, Dryden, and Dante. \"His appreciation \u00a0of \u00a0Shakespeare,\" \u00a0writes \u00a0Sir \u00a0Herbert \u00a0Read, \u00a0\"was \u00a0subject \u00a0to \u00a0his \u00a0moral \u00a0or \u00a0religious scruples.\" \u00a0With Samuel \u00a0Johnson, \u00a0whom, \u00a0according \u00a0to \u00a0Sir \u00a0Herbert, \u00a0Eliot \u00a0\"honoured \u00a0above \u00a0all other English writers,\" he shared \"a faith in God and the fear of death.\"<\/p>\r\n \r\n

In After Strange Gods <\/em>Eliot wrote: \"I should say that in one's prose reflections one may be legitimately occupied with ideals, whereas in the writing of verse one can deal only with actuality.\" From this Cleanth Brooks elaborates: \"Poetry is the medium par excellence <\/em>for rendering a total situation\u2014for letting us know what it feels like to take a particular action or hold a particular belief or simply to look at something with imaginative sympathy.\" Brook's explains that it is Eliot's notion that the poet is thus \"committed 'to turn the unpoetical into\u00a0poetry' [and to fuse] 'the matter-of-fact and the fantastic.'\" But the meaning of \"reality,\" for Eliot, is especial, existing always \"at the edge of nothingness,\" where, as B. Rajan writes, \"the birth of meaning ... takes place in a manner both creative and ancient. Poetry cannot report the event; it must <\/span>be<\/em>the event, lived through in a form that can speak about itself while remaining wholly itself. This is a feat at least as difficult as it sounds, and if the poem succeeds in it, it is because, however much it remembers previous deaths by drowning, it creates its own life against its own thrust of questioning.\"<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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\"In effect,\" writes Herbert Howarth, \"Eliot demonstrated that a poet's business is not just reporting feeling, but extending feeling, and creating a shape to convey it.\" Eliot's poetry, then, is a process of \"living by thought,\" says Rajan, \"of seeking to find peace 'through a in St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot declined his citizenship and settled in Britain where he became a British citizen in 1927. He died on 4th January 1965, at his home in Kensington in London.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Works<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

The Waste Land <\/em>(1922), The Hollow Men <\/em>(1925), Ash Wednesday <\/em>(1930) and Four Quartets <\/em>are some of his well known poems. He has also written seven plays of which Murder in the Cathedral <\/em>deserves special attention.<\/p>\r\n

Eliot\u2019s Views on Poetry<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Innovator by heart and method, Eliot was a dominant figure of the twentieth century poetry who took bold strides in the poetic field by not compromising his ideals for the general interest of the public as well as with the language he used. He strongly believed that poetry should reflect the\u00a0complexities of modern civilization which can at times be difficult in finding expression in poetic language.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock\u201d <\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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Publication<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

This early major work of Eliot was published in Poetry <\/em>magazine in 1915 though it was completed in 1910 or 1911. The poem was published in the magazine by Eliot\u2019s friend Ezra Pounds persuasion. Later this literary piece was published in Prufrock and Other Observations <\/em>in 1917. The poem was written before the beginning of the First World War when Britain was described and accepted as the most modern country found on the globe.<\/p>\r\n

The Title<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Originally the poem was entitled as \u201cPrufrock among the Women\u201d but later before its publicaton in Poetry <\/em>magazine, the title was changed as \u201cThe love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.<\/em>\u201d This narrative poem deals with an instance of the life of the titular character Mr Prufrock. The name of the character was taken by Eliot from the advertisement of William Prufrock Furniture Company, a business enterprise found in Louis, Eliot\u2019s hometown. The two initials are mere invention of the poet. Eliot used the words \u201clove song\u201d with reference to Rudyard Kipling\u2019s poem \u201cThe Love Song of Har Dyal<\/em>\u201d which was published in the collection Plain Tales from the Hills.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

As a Dramatic Monologue<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

This modernistic poem appears in the form of a dramatic monologue. Dramatic Monologue is used as a kind of character study that gives an account of an instance where the narrator \/ speaker relates a topic, thereby throwing light on the speaker\u2019s inner feelings intentionally as well as unintentionally to the listeners. The main aim of such kind of narrative is to provide as much personal information of the speaker rather than the topic\/ subject that is discussed by the speaker.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Epigraph<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Eliot has attached an epigraph to the poem which is taken from the Renaissance Italian Poet Dante Alighieri from Canto 27 of the Inferno. <\/em>The epigraph sums up to a six-line quotation which recounts the story of Dante who has led an unethical life is helped by the good folks from heaven. In order to frighten Dante from committing further sin, heaven seeks the aid of another poet named Virgil to provide Dante a safe tour through the horrors of hell.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The quote of the epigraph is said by Guido da Montefeltro, one of the characters in the eighth circle of the hell. When Dante asks Guido to tell his story , Guido makes this quote which roughly means that Guido would not have told his story to Dante, if he had the opportunity to go out of hell. But since Dante is stuck in Hades, Guido\u2019s story as well as his words will remain unarticulated in the world of dead which will always remain as a secret.<\/p>\r\n

Summary<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

The poem describes a typical modern man in the early 1900s and his emotions which raise questions about his place in society. The action of the poem revolves entirely around the\u00a0speaker who is walking aimlessly in the town, with his mind preoccupied with the memories of his past. This urban man is filled with feelings of isolation, fear which had made him incapable to make and take decisions in his life.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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His physical as well as intellectual inertia has prevented him from seizing various opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress has affected his overall well being. Moreover he is also frustrated by the memories of unattained carnal loves. In the poem, the speaker, Prufrock, appears to address a potential lover with whom he want to consummate. But at the same time, he is attacked with the feeling of fear that curbs or prevents him from taking the risk to approach the potential lover. His mind is filled with anxieties as well as obsession and hallucinates that other people are making fun of his inadequacies like his physical appearance. As a result he scolds himself for thinking about such kind of ideas of taking risk.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

At this point Eliot makes Prufrock\u2019s mind to meander to a series of fairly concrete physical setting like the cityscape to the several interiors at the social gathering like the women\u2019s arms in the lamplight, fireplaces, coffee spoon. Again Prufrock\u2019s mind travels and shows a series of vague ocean images which explains the speaker\u2019s emotional distance from the world. Prufrock feels that this world is looking down upon him as a second \u2013 rate status described in the words \u2013 \u201cI am not Prince Hamlet<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

One of the famous lines in the poem that sums up the very essence of this literary piece is this: \u201cI\u2019ve measured out my life in coffee spoons<\/em>\u201d which sets the mood of the poem. The image\u00a0 of the coffee spoons <\/em>conveys how the narrator looks back and accesses his life with the least inadequate tool to measure his mundane and unremarkable life. Prufrock is the embodiment of frustration and impotence of the modern man who is described with thwarted desires and modern\u00a0disillusionment. Prufrock stands for those voices in modern literature who are the victims of hidden and unexplored feelings of weariness, longing, embarrassment, boredom, sexual frustration, emasculation, a sense of decay as well as an awareness of morality.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nAnalysis<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

The poem focuses on revealing Prufrock\u2019s sense of insecurity which is not presented directly but is craftily presented, in the form of clues to the readers by adopting literary tool called the dramatic monologue. This throwing of clues to the readers is heightened by using Dante\u2019s epigraph which clearly expresses the inability of Prufrock to speak out his feeling directly in life as he does in the poem easily.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Initially the epigraph appears to be a meaningless and a detached piece, but when it is placed along with the context of the rest of the poem, the readers starts to get clues as well as meaning that throws light into the inner feelings of Prufrock. Though Prufrock is unable to articulate his feelings, Eliot creates this proem which effectively reveals the insecurity of the narrator.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

As a skilful craftsman, Eliot uses the epigraph as a means to the readers to explain that the poem is spoken not as Prufrock would do but what he would have uttered if he was to come back from another place, like Dante. Prufrock is able to recognize and understand his insecurities as well as drawbacks in this place which is related in this poetic form.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The readers find the poem more as a medium that reveals the narrator\u2019s mind and feelings rather than an actual love song. Though Prufrock makes effort in making the poem sound as a romantic one, he fails miserably. The short of romances gives the readers an opportunity or a\u00a0window to know more about Prufrock\u2019s broken mind. Metaphors, imagery as well as the choice of words are used to provide a view into Prufrock\u2019s shy, egoistic and paralyzed nature.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Eliot uses the metaphor of a cat in the poem. By nature, cat is less sociable than dogs which are commonly considered as man\u2019s best friend. On the other hand cat keeps to itself most of the time. Therefore the image of the cat runs parallel with the character of Prufrock who has difficulty in socializing with others, particularly the women folk.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Eliot\u2019s choice of words also helps in describing Prufrock\u2019s nature when he refers to the term, \u201cyellow fog\u201d and \u201cyellow smoke\u201d. The colour \u201cyellow\u201d refers to cowardice. Usually smoke and fog is a kind of hindrance that prevents a person from moving ahead. In the poem, this word represents the mind of Prufrock which is filled or is clouded by negative feelings like cowardice, fear, alienation that prevents him from moving ahead in life.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The crab metaphor in the poem reveals the other side of Prufrock his egoistic side which is well explained in the following lines \u201cI should have been a pair of ragged claws \/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.\u201d The imagery of the silent sea reveals Prufrock\u2019s vast mind that wants to remain alone and wants to escape from the real world. Thus the entire poem us about Prufrock weighing in his head whether or not to speak to the woman. As a result questions abound in this poem: there are overwhelming questions, dropped questions, questions about what the narrator presumes or dares to do.<\/p>\r\n

J. Alfred Prufrock as Narrator\/ Speaker<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

This monologue piece revolves around Prufrock who appears to be a bald, insecure man living an unremarkable life in his middle age. The insecurity of Prufrock is well described through his thoughts that are basically dull, uneventful resulting in living a bored mediocre life\u00a0which has affected him in even taking decisions in life thereby questioning his very existence in the society. His insecurity has failed him to grab opportunities or taking risk (particularly the women) where upon he is leading a life where there is no events except the progress of days which remains always the same. His timidity as well as sense of fear of failure has always pulled him back from taking up action to move ahead in life.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nSetting<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

The setting of this modern poem is in a big, dirty city in the evening where we readers find our speaker as an unhappy man who is torn between conflicting feelings of fear in living and the boredom that has enveloped everywhere during that time in society before the First World War took the world in its storm.<\/p>\r\n

Characters<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

The Narrator, J. Alfred Prufrock, is the main character in this narrative poem whom Eliot presents as a timid, overcautious middle- aged man. His evening walk in the smoky city takes the reader to the shabby streets in the city, cheap hotels, as well as restaurants which finally come to an end at a social gathering. In the social gathering we find women participants whom Prufrock has interest in talking, but his timidity as well as sense of fear prevents him from fulfilling his desire.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The Listener is the omnipresent and unidentified companion of Prufrock. The listeners are able to get a slice of his character without taking part in his action.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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The Women present at the social gathering are the ones that Prufrock wants to make acquaintance with, but is worried about their reaction towards him, if he initiates a conversation with one of the women in the group.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The Lonely Men in Shirtsleeves are other characters who are found leaning out of the window smoking their pipes. These men have a similarity with the speaker because both of them are there in the scene but at the same time not a part of the scene.<\/p>\r\n

Themes\u00a0<\/strong>The recurrent themes in the poem are<\/p>\r\n\r\n