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- “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an iconic modernist poem, written by the American poet T. S. Elio t in the early 1910s but not published until 1915. Daring in its formal innovations and withering in its critique of modern existence, “Prufrock” centers an alienated and indecisive speaker who’s preoccupied with his own sexual frustration.
www.sparknotes.com/poetry/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock/The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Study Guide | SparkNotes
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It is considered one of the defining works of modernism, a literary movement that saw writers experimenting with form and digging into the alienation, isolation, and confusion of life at the turn of the 20th century. Read the full text of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
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.
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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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As such, Prufrock is a modern version of the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” who is similarly intent on having sex with his paramour. Yet whereas Marvell’s silver-tongued speaker presents his mistress with a sustained and logical argument, Prufrock is indecisive and digressive, and he gets ...
Summary. This poem, the earliest of Eliot’s major works, was completed in 1910 or 1911 but not published until 1915. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man—overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot is a modernist poem narrated by a middle-aged man who grapples with mortality and inexpressibility.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an iconic modernist poem, written by the American poet T. S. Eliot in the early 1910s but not published until 1915. Daring in its formal innovations and withering in its critique of modern existence, “Prufrock” centers an alienated and indecisive speaker who’s preoccupied with his own sexual ...
