Alfred Prufrock" he continually writes of Prufrock's struggle to answer his life's "overwhelming question." (10)With what is J. Alfred Prufrock is so desperately struggling? He tussles with his intrapersonal paralysis to pursue women while making attempts to stave off aging. This indecisiveness creates a very bleak and semi-morbid image throughout the poem. Eliot's beginning and ending to this poem very strongly convey this, Prufrock's internal battle.
The epigraph of the poem is a passage from Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, more specifically the Inferno. The Inferno is Dante's journey through the rings of Hell in his search for enlightenment. Eliot uses this theme to support Prufrock's feelings that he is stuck in his own personal hell. Another similarity between the two works is the descending theme. In the Inferno, Dante travels further and further down through the rings of hell on his way up to the heavens. In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot starts his description at the skyline slowly works his down to a finale in the sea. .
The first ten lines of the poem are the beginning of his austere descent to discover his inability to "eat a peach" (Eliot 124) with a peach being a traditional metaphor for a woman's genitalia. Eliot uses the metaphor of "a patient etherized" (3) to Prufrock's incapacity to engage the women who he looks upon, as a cat outside a window, throughout the poem. Prufrock appears to be lonely, so Eliot gives him the companion of the unknown listener (the reader) to escort him in his downward spiral. Prufrock's emptiness is conveyed "through half-deserted streets," (Eliot 4) "muttering retreats," (Eliot 5) "one-night cheap hotels" (Eliot 6) which leads the reader to wonder what it is that has made his world so bleak. The reader gets the feeling that Prufrock is untrusting of the world, as though he is being swindled into trying to find the answer to his "overwhelming question.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is an extraordinary masterpiece by T.S. Eliot. Eliot may possibly give us the essence of twenty-first century poetry. Through the "Love Song," Eliot expresses exuberant writing technique via random comments deposited together. Certainly much of what he writes is...
T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is an examination of the tortured psyche of a man who is looking for love, indecisive, educated, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. ... As is seen in the entire work by T.S. Elliot "The Love Song of J. ...
M.H. Abrams once said that there are three things that characterize a dramatic monologue. First, it encompasses the assertions of a "specific individual (other than the poet) at a specific moment in time." Second, the monologue is "specifically directed at a listener or listeners whose presence is...
The poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot, is a depiction of sadness and a disillusioned narrator that seems to have given up hope. At the very beginning of the poem, Eliot uses a quote from Dante's "Inferno"," preparing the poem's reader to expect a vision of hell "If I thought ...
The state of alienation, defined by T.S. Eliot, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as separation, isolation, and disillusionment, characterizes industrial civilization today because people are unable to find community or meaning without alienation. In T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"" a...
