"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“ (1915) T.S. Eliot
ironic monologue modern, urban man feels isolated incapable of decisive action ironic title - not a conventional love song he would like to speak of love but he does not dare
Inferno by Dante evening of Good Friday in the year 1300 Dante Alighieri lost in forest Virgil, the great Roman poet, guides Dante through Hell and eventually Heaven, where Dante's beloved Beatrice awaits Nine levels of Hell
suggests Prufrock is one of the damned and that he speaks only because he is sure no one will listen the reader is overhearing his thoughts "you and I" of the opening line includes the reader, suggesting that only by accompanying Purfrock can one understand his problems
PRUFROCK AS MODERN MAN represents thwarted desires and disillusionment epitomizes frustration and impotence represents thwarted desires and disillusionment captures the sense of the unheroic nature of life a pathetic figure, not tragic
J. Alfred Prufrock lives in solitary gloom imagines his attempt to converse with the woman he loves fails to make her understand him has attended parties many times and knows how it will be hesitates out of fear of rejection
plans his approach and puts off the action (“There will be time“) "Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?" to sing a “love song" rehearses a speech but gives up almost as soon as he has started rationalizes that his speaking would not have achieved any real response. sees himself as the old fool
from Kathleen McCoy's and Judith Harlan's ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1785 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992: 265-66)
Representative Man of early Modernism? shy, cultivated, oversensitive sexually retarded (impotent?) ruminative, isolated, self-aware from A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ed. Jack Myers and David Wojahan. Copyright © 1991 by Southern Illinois UP
trapped inside own self-awareness look out on the world from deep inside private cave of feeling and see the world/themselves with unflattering exactness cannot or will not do anything about dilemma so fall back on self-serving explanation They quake before the World.
Allusions organic, demanding a fusion and concentration of intellect, feeling, and experience integrates ideas from life and literature private, inside “jokes” that only some “get”