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We talk a lot about poets' first appearances in Poetry and one of the most influential, and most frequently mentioned, is T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” ...
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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot(Bio | Poems)is the inner monologue of a city gentleman stricken by feelings of isolation, inadequacy and incapability of taking decisive action. It isn’t easy to decide what Prufrock is about; the fragmented poetic landscape of T.S. Eliot’s poetry makes it difficult to pin down one exact feeling wi...
Eliot engages with several themes in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ These themes include anxiety, desire, and disappointment. The speaker’s interior life, hidden from the rest of the world, is alive for the reader. There, readers can understand the speaker’s hope and desire for a romantic connection and his struggle to act on that desire. H...
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot(Bio | Poems) is primarily written in free verse. This means that most of the lines do not follow a specific rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. But, the poem is not without either. Eliot briefly uses various meters, such as the common iambic pentameter and less common spondaic and trochaic feet. For...
T.S. Eliot(Bio | Poems) uses several literary devices in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ These include but are not limited to similes, examples of personification, and enjambment. The latter is a common literary device concerned with how a poet may or may not cut off a line before the end of a phrase or sentence—for example, the transitionbe...
Line 1-12
The opening line of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ “Let us go then, you and I,” provides the reader with a hint that the poem needs to be read as an internalized, dramatic monologue. It also gives us the idea that the narrator is speaking to another person, and thus what is being said is a reflection of his own personality. In this case, the personality of Alfred J. Prufrock is one that’s pedantic, slightly miserable (“like a patient etherized upon a table”), and focused mainly on the...
Lines 13-14
Finally, there is a presence in the poem besides the voiceof J. Prufrock – the women talking of Michelangelo. Though they are a living presence, the focus on ‘Michelangelo’ actually serves to deaden them; they exist in the poem as a series of conversations, which Prufrock lumps into one category by calling them ‘the women.’ It sets the scene at a party and simultaneously sets Prufrock on his own: an island in the sea of academia, floating along on light sophistication and empty conversations....
Lines 15-22
Critics are divided as to the symbolism of the yellow smog. Michael North wrote, “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes” appears clearly to every reader as a cat. Still, the cat itself is absent, represented explicitly only in parts — back, muzzle, tongue — and by its actions — licking, slipping, leaping, curling. The metaphor has, in a sense, been hollowed out to be replaced by a series of metonyms, and thus it stands as a rhetorical introduction to what follows.” According...
Eliot’s poem can be sourced from his book Collected Poems 1909-1962. Roger Mitchell wrote, in this poem: “J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot’s poems. He is the Representative Man of early Modernism. Shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded (many have said impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of s...
Readers who enjoyed ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ should also consider T.S. Eliot’s best poems, including the following: 1. ‘Portrait of a Lady‘– published in 1915. It describes a relationship between a callous young man and an older woman. 2. ‘Sweeny Erect‘ – introduces one of Eliot’s best-known characters, Sweeney, in a brothel alongside ...
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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has garnered a great deal of scholarship. Yet little of it has specifically dealt with the poem as an exploration of cultural, philosophic and religious contexts of love. It is, after all, a love song, so even if it initially seems more of a satire on such poetry,
The best The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock study guide on the planet. The fastest way to understand the poem's meaning, themes, form, rhyme scheme, meter, and poetic devices.
Jul 5, 2020 · From the title itself to the ominously cryptic ending, in which an anonymous “we” drowns in sea of human voices, the poetry of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” continues to challenge readers’ expectations both of what constitutes poetry and what constitutes meaning.
The poem focuses on the dilemma caused by modern urban civilization and therefore, the purpose of this paper is to show how T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock reflects...
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This ground-breaking modernist poem has attracted many interpretations, involving everything from psychoanalysis to biographical readings, but it remains an elusive poem. Background context. T. S. Eliot wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ while he was still a student at Harvard University, in his early twenties.
