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J. Alfred Prufrock
- Michelangelo is not the first proper name we encounter in the poem. That recognition belongs to J. Alfred Prufrock, who seems to be the speaker of the poem, and whose love song this poem must be.
www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1580188/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-t-s-eliotT.S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred… | The Poetry Foundation
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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.
T. S. Eliot wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ while he was still a student at Harvard University, in his early twenties.
- Summary
- Themes
- Structure and Form
- Literary Devices
- Detailed Analysis
- Historical Background
- Similar Poetry
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 ...
- Female
- Poetry Analyst
In November 1915 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" — along with Eliot's poems "Portrait of a Lady", "The Boston Evening Transcript", "Hysteria", and "Miss Helen Slingsby" — was included in Catholic Anthology 1914–1915 edited by Ezra Pound and printed by Elkin Mathews in London.
- T. S. Eliot
- 1915
When he imagines a woman to whom he may be attracted, he can see her only in pieces. When he despairs, he imagines himself as a pair of crab claws—not even a whole crab, just another remnant. Prufrock is profoundly alienated from the world and people around him—a modern narrator, not a Romantic one.
A summary of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in T. S. Eliot's Eliot's Poetry. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Eliot's Poetry and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
The poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot involves a first-person narrator or lyrical speaker – J. Alfred Prufrock, and a recipient of his monologue whose identity is debatable, as various critics have assumed the speaker to be talking with himself, a woman or the reader.
