The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock T.S.Eliot Introduction to British Literature May 12-13, 2015

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock a variation on the dramatic monologue, Eliot modernizes the form by removing the implied listeners and focusing on Prufrock’s interiorit y and isolation. powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the vividness of character achiev ed.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock strongly influenced by the French Symbolists, like Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire An individual Eliot creates with Prufrock: the moody, urban, isolated-yet-sensitive thinker, an unacknowledged poet, a sort of artist for t he common man.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock its use of fragmentation and juxtaposition. The f ragmentation (and reassembly) being mental focu s. fragmentation, although anxiety-provoking, is ne vertheless productive the poem would have seemed much more nihilisti c suggesting that something new can be made fr om the ruins. The series of hypothetical encounters at the poe m’s center are iterated and discontinuous but ne vertheless lead to a sort of epiphany (albeit a dar k one) rather than just leading nowhere.

Prufrock, an antiromantic hero While “Prufrock” ends with a devaluation of its hero, it exalts its creator. The last line of the poem suggests otherwise —that when the world intrudes, when “hu man voices wake us,” the dream is shatte red: “we drown.” With this single line, Eliot dis mantles the romantic notion that poetic geni us is all that is needed to triumph over t he destructive, impersonal forces of the mo dern world.