Search results
People also ask
What are some of Eliot's best poems?
When did Eliot write the Love Song of Alfred Prufrock?
Where did Eliot's poem come from?
Is there an autobiographical connection between Eliot & Prufrock?
What is the theme of the Love Song of Alfred Prufrock?
What is the opening line of the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock?
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was first published by British poet T. S. Eliot in 1915; Eliot later included it as the title poem in his landmark 1917 collection Prufrock and Other Observations. The poem is a dramatic monologue whose brooding speaker relays the anxieties and preoccupations of his inner life, as well as his romantic ...
- 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
T. S. Eliot wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ while he was still a student at Harvard University, in his early twenties.
Like Guido, Prufrock had never intended his story to be told, and so by quoting Guido, Eliot reveals his view of Prufrock's love song. [25] Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from a split personality, and that he embodies both Guido and Dante in the Inferno analogy.
- T. S. Eliot
- 1915
Far from a true love song, “Prufrock” is a lament for thwarted meaning and desire. Read the free full text, a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of important quotes from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Course Hero Literature Instructor Russell Jaffe provides an in-depth summary and analysis of the narrative voice of T. S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Jul 5, 2020 · No poet in memory has ever had quite so spectacular a debut as the young T. S. Eliot when his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was first published in Poetry magazine in 1915, thanks in large part to the good offices of another relatively young American poet, Ezra Pound.
