Analysis of Prufrock

In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document, monograph or section or chapter
thereof.[1] The epigraph may serve as a preface to the work; as a summary; as a counter-example; or as a link from the work to a
wider literary canon,[2] with the purpose of either inviting comparison or enlisting a conventional context.[3]
A book may have an overall epigraph that is part of the front matter, or one for each chapter.
Examples[edit]
 As the epigraph to The Sum of All Fears, Tom Clancy[4] quotes Winston Churchill in the context of thermonuclear war:
Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most
intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put
them at a table together – what do you get? The sum
of their fears.

 Sir Walter Scott frequently used epigraphs in his historical novels, including throughout his Waverley novels.
 The long quotation from Dante's Inferno that prefaces T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is part of a speech by
one of the damned in Dante's Hell.
 The epigraph to E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime quotes Scott Joplin's instructions to those who play his music, "Do not play this piece
fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast."
 The epigraph to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is John 12:24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
 The epigraph to Eliot's Gerontion is a quotation from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.
 Eliot's "The Hollow Men" uses the line "Mistah Kurtz, he dead" from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as one of its two
epigraphs.
 As an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation."
 The epigraph to Theodore Herzl's Altneuland is "If you will it, it is no dream..." which became a slogan of the Zionist movement.
 Louis Antoine de Saint-Just's line "Nobody can rule guiltlessly" appears before chapter one in Arthur Koestler's 1940 anti-
totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon.
 A Samuel Johnson quotation serves as an epigraph in Hunter S. Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "He who
makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
 Stephen King uses many epigraphs in his writing, usually to mark the beginning of another section in a novel. An unusual
example is The Stand wherein he uses lyrics from certain songs to express the metaphor used in a particular part.
Epigraph, consisting of an
excerpt from the book itself, William Morris's The House of the
Wolfings
 Jack London uses the first stanza of John Myers O'Hara's poem "Atavism" as the epigraph to The Call of the Wild.
 Cormac McCarthy opens his 1985 novel Blood Meridian with three epigraphs: quotations from French writer and
philosopher Paul Valéry, from German Christian mystic and Gnostic Jacob Boehme, and a 1982 news clipping from the Yuma
Sun reporting the claim of members of an Ethiopian archeological excavation that a fossilized skull three hundred millennia old
seemed to have been scalped.
 The epigraphs to the preamble of Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual (La Vie mode d'emploi) and to the book as a whole
warn the reader that tricks are going to be played and that all will not be what it seems.
Epigraph and dedication page, The Waste

Land
 J. K. Rowling's novels frequently begin with epigraphs relating to the themes explored. For example, Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows opens with two: a quotation from Aeschylus's tragedy The Libation Bearers and a quotation from William Penn.
 Quotation from Woodrow Wilson's The State on the title page of every issue of The Bohemian Review, a magazine endorsing
independence of Czechs and Slovaks to Austria-Hungary in 1917–1918 (example).
Fictional quotations[edit]
Some writers use as epigraphs fictional quotations that purport to be related to the fiction of the work itself. Examples include:
In films [edit]
 The film Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby opens with a fictional quotation attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt for
comedic effect.
In literature [edit]
 Some science fiction works, such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, Frank Herbert's Dune series, and Jack
McKinney's Robotech novelizations use quotations from an imagined future history of the period of their story.
 Fantasy literature may also include epigraphs. For example, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series includes epigraphs supposedly
quoted from the epic poetry of the Earthsea archipelago.
 Elizabeth C. Bunce's Edgar Award-winning Myrtle Hardcastle mystery series, beginning with Premeditated Myrtle includes
epigraphs by the fictional 19th century scholar H.M. Hardcastle at the beginning of each chapter of the five-book series.
 The first and last books of Diane Duane's Rihannsu series of Star Trek novels pair quotations from Lays of Ancient Rome with
imagined epigraphs from Romulan literature.
 F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby carries on title page a poem called from its first hemistich "Then Wear the Gold Hat,"
purportedly signed by Thomas Parke D'Invilliers. D'Invilliers is a character in Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise.
o This cliché is parodied by Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide To Fantasyland.
 Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair has quotations from supposedly future works about the action of the story.
 John Green's The Fault in Our Stars has a quotation from a fictitious novel, An Imperial Affliction, which features prominently as
a part of the story.
 Stephen King's The Dark Half has epigraphs taken from the fictitious novels written by the protagonist.
 Dean Koontz's The Book of Counted Sorrows began as a fictional book of poetry from which Koontz would "quote" when no
suitable existing option was available; Koontz simply wrote all these epigraphs himself. Many fans, rather than realizing the work
was Koontz' own invention, apparently believed it was a real, but rare, volume; Koontz later collected the existing verse into an
actual book.[5]
 The Ring Verse at the beginning of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings describes the Rings of Power, the central plot device
of the novel.
 Akame Majyo's Time Anthology begins each chapter with an excerpt from a fictional grimoire.
 Brandon Sanderson, in his Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series uses various epigraphs including letters between various
gods, so-called "death rattles" and quotes from the villain's diary.
 Edward Gorey's The Unstrung Harp is not only about a fictitious novel, but its author thinks of a fictional verse for its epigraph.
See also[edit]
 Epigram, a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement
 Incipit, the first few words of a text, employed as an identifying label
 Flavor text, applied to games and toys
 Prologue, an opening to a story that establishes context and may give background
 Keynote, the first non-specific talk on a conference spoken by an invited (and usually famous) speaker in order to sum up the
main theme of the conference.
Examples[edit]
of their fears.

epigraphs.
Wolfings

Land
In films [edit]
comedic effect.
actual book.[5]
of the novel.
See also[edit]
Examples[edit]
of their fears.

epigraphs.
Wolfings

Land
In films [edit]
comedic effect.
actual book.[5]
of the novel.
See also[edit]
Ellipsis and Aposiopesis in “The Love Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock”
Edward Lobb
Published in Connotations Vol. 22.2 (2012/13)
On October 4, 1923, T. S. Eliot wrote to John Collier, a prospective

contributor to The Criterion, about a poem Collier had submitted. “This
particular type of fragmentary conversation (see p. 4) was invented by
Jules Laforgue and done to death by Aldous Huxley,” Eliot noted; he went
on to admit that “I have been a sinner myself in the use of broken
conversations punctuated by three dots” (Letters 241). The “sin” of ellipsis
was one to which Eliot succumbed frequently in his early poetry,1) and his
disdain for the three dots suggests that he found them too easy a means of
suggestive omission. Poetic economy has of course always depended on
the omission of superfluous connectors, allowing the reader to infer the
meaning; modern poetry took the process a step further, emphasizing the
reader's construction of meaning, but also often alienating readers who
found that they needed more guidance than the new poets were giving
them.
I want to approach the most famous ellipsis in modern poetry—the
“overwhelming question” which is mentioned twice in “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock” and implied throughout, but never formulated—by
examining Eliot's use of local ellipsis throughout the poem. In juxtaposing
things, persons, and issues with no clear connectors, Eliot draws attention
to Prufrock's idiosyncratic personality, but also, ingeniously, to the ways in
which Prufrock's mind reflects universal modern anxieties. Taking my cue
from Eliot's own impatience with “three dots,” I shall discuss this form of
ellipsis only when necessary [→page 168] to make other points. The
“dots” generally require little analysis in any case, since they typically
indicate pauses rather than actual omissions:
I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. (ll.
120–21) 2)
The five dots between verse paragraphs likewise require little comment.
Eliot uses the device just twice in “Prufrock,” and the breaks are no more
decisive in changing a scene or topic than the white spaces between any
two verse paragraphs in the poem.
All of these different breaks, however, suggest the broader importance of
ellipsis in the poem: along with the other forms of this device I shall be
discussing, they adumbrate the Grand Ellipsis of the “overwhelming
question” and clarify both by implication and exclusion what that question
is. The first form of local ellipsis I wish to discuss is that of the missing
connector in some of Prufrock's similes and metaphors.
1. Simile as Ellipsis
When Burns writes, “O, my luve's like a red, red rose,” we know
immediately what the simile means; when Prufrock says “the evening is
spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table” (ll. 2–3),
on the other hand, we have to work hard to find the connection. Early
reviewers and critics, expecting a visual simile, accused Eliot of writing
nonsense3) and failed to see that he was using a Modernist form of the
traditional trope that Ruskin defined in Modern Painters as pathetic
fallacy. It is part of the poem's brilliance that most of us fail to see the
qualities projected onto the landscape until we have finished reading the
poem, or, more often, until we have read it many times. The trope of
pathetic fallacy is as old as literature itself, but here it is also specifically
Modernist in its emphatic imposition onto a landscape of qualities that no
actual scene could possibly suggest. [→page 169] After several readings,
we can see that the etherized patient perfectly embodies many of
Prufrock's most salient characteristics. Both are sick; both are
anaesthetized in one way or another to escape pain; both are mentally
isolated, one in literal unconsciousness, the other in a dream–like
sequence of pictures from the unconscious; both are, for different reasons,
passive, radically vulnerable, and unable to communicate (“It is impossible
to say just what I mean!” [l. 104]). The initial opacity of this famous simile
as such—particularly in the first lines of a poem—is balanced by an almost
overdetermined psychological profile.
The various meanings of the etherized–patient image are reinforced when
we read other initially cryptic statements that reflect Prufrock's psyche.
These often involve animal analogies that suggest something of Prufrock's
alienation:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window–
panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window–
panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from
chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house and fell asleep. (ll. 15–
22)
The fog–cat does not at first appear to describe Prufrock at all, nor does
Prufrock say it does, but its falling asleep parallels that of the etherized
patient and anticipates later images of sleep and death, including the
evening that “sleeps so peacefully” (l. 75), the severed head of John the
Baptist (l. 82) and the mermaids' victims in the last lines of the poem (l.
131).4) The cat image also reflects Prufrock's sense of isolation, which is
projected onto the fogbound house as well. Two later animal images, the
pinned insect (ll. 57–58) and the pair of ragged claws (ll. 73–74), focus our
sense of Prufrock's vulnerability and alienation. Like the opening simile of
the patient, all three animal images convey Prufrock's fears and sense of
himself in highly indirect ways that make sense only after we have come to
know the poem as a whole.
[→page 170] None of this is entirely new; I draw attention to the gap
between the elements of simile in the poem to suggest that it is always
and only Prufrock himself who provides the link. This is equally true of the
apparent disjunction between Prufrock's major preoccupations.
2. The Gap Between Sex and Metaphysics

Most critics remain as silent about the overwhelming question as Prufrock
himself.5) Perhaps they take our knowledge of it for granted, but I suspect
that many of them are afraid of being told “That is not what [he] meant at
all” (l. 97). To be clear, however, the question involves the meaning of life
and the existence of God, not simply because the question must be
overwhelming, but because the historical and literary figures in the poem—
Dante, Michelangelo, St. John the Baptist, Lazarus, Hamlet—are all
associated with religious and philosophical themes and narratives. If
Prufrock is talking to himself (a subject of debate we shall return to), he
has no need to articulate what he knows he means, and when Eliot speaks
to us as readers, he may simply be employing poetic indirection. But I think
this Grand Ellipsis, as I have called it, is explicable in thematic terms, and
that these are clarified by Prufrock's other, non–metaphysical obsession:
women and sex. This is so overtly developed in the poem that I need not
discuss it here; what is more interesting from both a technical and
thematic point of view is the juxtaposition of sex and metaphysics in
“Prufrock.”
There are no fewer than fifteen questions in this poem,6) but the most
important, implied throughout, are unstated and can be summarized
roughly as “Can I ask a woman for a date?” and “What is the meaning of
life?” The disjuncture between the orders of magnitude of the two
questions is comic, and suggests that the questions exist in ironic
counterpoint: how can Prufrock imagine that he might “disturb the
universe” if he cannot even talk to a woman? In dramatic and
psychological terms, this is plausible, but there is a thematic reason for the
juxtaposition as well, and one that goes to the heart of the poem. [→page
171] “Prufrock” is a poem of loneliness, and that loneliness exists on both
the personal and the metaphysical levels. The two questions are in fact
versions of the same problem—a desire to get beyond the prison of the self,
whether that loneliness is personal and sexual or cosmic and
metaphysical. Pascal wrote of the heavens that “Le silence éternel de ces
espaces infinies m'effraie” (Fragment 206), and Prufrock is talking, or
declining to talk, about the same fear, the same desire for refuge and
solace in the arms of a lover or of God. Sex and metaphysics are analogous
in the poem, but while analogies typically clarify, this one remains opaque
until we find the missing link between them, and, as with the opening
simile, that link is Prufrock's consciousness.7)
Certainly the poem is filled with images of personal isolation: I have
already mentioned the etherized patient, the yellow fog–cat, the fog–bound
house cut off visually from the world, the pinned insect, and the “pair of
ragged claws” (l. 73). The crab's exoskeleton is echoed in Prufrock's own
stiff attire, his “morning coat [and] collar mounting firmly to the chin” (l.
42), formal dress that keeps people at a distance. The image that
generalizes Prufrock's situation is particularly interesting:
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow
streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt–sleeves, leaning out of
windows? ...
(ll. 70–72; Eliot's ellipsis)
This is perhaps the most poignant of Prufrock's images, since radical

isolation, one man per lonely bed–sitter, is paired with its contrary, the
longing for connection, as the men lean out from buildings into the world
like figures in a Stanley Spencer painting.8)
The longing is obvious in Prufrock himself: why not reach out, then, either
to another person or to a God who makes the universe a less cold and
frightening place?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;
[→page 172] I have seen the moment of my greatness
flicker
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and
snicker,
And in short, I was afraid. (ll. 81–86)
The Footman's snicker immediately precedes and obviously parallels

another rebuff, this time by a woman:
Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all,
That is not it, at all.” (ll. 90–98)
It is in these two imagined scenes that the sexual and the metaphysical,
which Prufrock has discussed or implied separately to this point, collide
with deliberate awkwardness. Prufrock cannot imagine an encounter at
either level that is not marked by embarrassment, specifically through the
intrusion of the other element. The “eternal” and presumably cosmic
Footman engages in a merely personal, implicitly sexual sneer at
Prufrock's appearance9); Prufrock then imagines attempting to discuss the
afterlife, “That undiscover'd country from whose bourne / No traveler
returns”23) in a clearly erotic setting, and being deflated by a woman with
more physical activities in mind. In the first case the cosmic descends
bathetically to the sexual, in the second it is subverted by it. The pairing of
the two in Prufrock's mind explains his tendency to juxtapose them, and
we sense that he feels inadequate in both areas. His failure to connect the
two issues except by implication is, like his elusive similes and images, a
form of reticence—of ellipsis—at the poem's thematic level. Eliot's
treatment of Prufrock's personal sexuality in the poem, however, goes
even deeper in its exploration of sexual loneliness as a reflection or
microcosm of a metaphysical problem. [→page 173]
3. Men, Women ... and Prufrock

Prufrock's obvious insecurities about his appearance—thin arms and legs,
probably premature baldness (ll. 40–41, 44, 82, 122)—reflect the anxieties
of many men, and are often read as a sense of inadequate masculinity.
Prufrock is candid about his insecurities, but most suggestive when he is
most indirect, and his gender presentation contributes to the parallel of
sex and metaphysics in the poem.
Many commentaries on “Prufrock”10) mention that lines 90–93, cited
above, allude to a famous passage in Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress”:
Let us roll all our Strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one Ball:
And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the Iron gates of Life. (ll. 41–44)
The carpe diem philosophy of Marvell's speaker is at odds with Prufrock's

assurance that “there will be time” (ll. 23, 37), suggesting Prufrock's
subliminal awareness of his self–deceptions. More importantly, however,
Marvell's sexual image of storming “the Iron gates of Life” is made ironic
here in a personally self–deprecating way. If Marvell's speaker anticipates
tearing a cannonball through the gates, Prufrock, transferring Marvell's
earlier verb, can only imagine rolling his cannonball towards the
overwhelming question—implying that he is not up to the job—and the
response of his would–be mistress suggests that she is far more interested
in sex than he is, a witty reversal of the situation in Marvell's poem.
This reversal is not simply of outlooks but implicitly of sexes as
traditionally conceived. The woman is sexually frank and aggressive,
impatient with mere talk, and therefore “male”; Prufrock is implicitly
feminized as he talks at length to no apparent purpose, and senses that his
own masculinity is called into question by his appearance and his
hesitations; his own image of the merely rolling cannonball is the objective
correlative, in Eliot's terms, of his fears.11) It is tempting to fix on
Prufrock's (or Eliot's own) sexual anxieties, but it is more productive, I
think, to look at what this reversal of sexual roles does to the [→page
174] relation of sex and metaphysics in the poem. Prufrock takes on the
woman's traditional role of procrastinator and becomes “coy” in both
senses: 1) making a show of sexual shyness or modesty, and 2) reluctant
to give details, as when we say that someone is coy about his age.
Prufrock's sexual coyness is the exact parallel of his metaphysical coyness
—his elliptic refusal to state the “overwhelming question,” much less
discuss it. He refuses to move forward in either area for various reasons,
including the possibility of disappointment (“And would it have been worth
it, after all”), but the real motive, as he admits, is fear. Although men
experience it all the time, fear is traditionally considered unmanly, and
Prufrock's admission that he is afraid adds to our sense that his gender
identity—not his sexual orientation, but the broader complex of emotional
and psychological factors that constitute his sexual nature—is neither
masculine nor feminine as customarily defined. This, too, is an ellipsis:
despite his hints and suggestions, Prufrock avoids any discussion of his
gender identity and moves on, crabwise, to other subjects.
We have seen how sex and metaphysics are linked in Prufrock's mind and
can infer some of the reasons for his fear of women. He has explained his
fear of raising metaphysical questions, however, only in sexual terms;
would it not be possible for him to raise those questions in a non–erotic
setting with the right woman or a male friend? Prufrock himself seems to
forestall this possibility when he first brings up the “overwhelming
question”:
Oh, do not ask “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit. (ll. 11–12)
We never learn whether Prufrock is speaking to another person or to

himself. As mentioned earlier, if he is talking to himself, he does not need
to articulate the question; in this case, short–circuiting the inquiry may
simply be a way of avoiding another round of fruitless introspection about
(in the words of “Ash–Wednesday I”) “These matters that with myself I too
much discuss / Too much explain” (ll. 28–29). If he really is talking to
someone else, however, a different [→page 175] explanation seems
plausible. Prufrock is reluctant to bring up ultimate questions in a hostile or
mocking environment, to feel the desperate
unfashionableness, the uncoolness, of bringing up meaning or God in an
emphatically secular atmosphere. If “Prufrock” is, as I have suggested, a
poem about kinds of loneliness, it is also a poem, the poem, of
awkwardness and embarrassment, and not just in the erotic sphere.
The fact that the erotic is always there suggests that Prufrock's anxiety
about bringing up the overwhelming question is not simply personal and
psychological—the fear of being thought foolish, credulous,
unsophisticated—but philosophical and even corporeal: his fears about his
own body's inadequacies are analogous to his anxieties about language
and the possibility of expressing meaning, and this constitutes yet another
link between sex and metaphysics in the poem. I would also like to suggest
that Prufrock's positioning of himself as effectively androgynous12) is not
simply an excuse for avoiding sexual pursuit but also, as with the
analogous figure of Tiresias in The Waste Land, a way of encompassing
contraries and avoiding definition. The importance of this will become
clearer when we look at Prufrock's need to avoid both coitus and
intellectual commitment.
4. Avoiding Conclusion
Prufrock's fear of mockery haunts both the sexual and metaphysical levels
of the poem, and that fear is his major reason for not beginning a serious
metaphysical conversation under any circumstances. He also has more
purely intellectual reasons to hesitate before broaching the “overwhelming
question,” including miscommunication (“That is not what I meant at all,” l.
97), and oversimplification (“It is impossible to say just what I mean!” l.
100). The poem's images of isolation, discussed in section 1, suggest not
only Prufrock's loneliness but also the extreme difficulty of real
communication at the best of times, and even the fear of actual solipsism.
[→page 176] Again and again in Eliot's early poetry we find individuals
isolated in lonely rooms. The predicament of “lonely men in shirt-sleeves,
leaning out of windows” (l. 72) recurs in many of the early poems. We hear
of “all the hands / That are raiding dingy shades / In a thousand furnished
rooms” (“Preludes” II), of “female smells in shuttered rooms” (“Rhapsody on
a Windy Night”), of Mr. Silvero, “who walked all night in the next room”
(“Gerontion”). It is clear that these closed rooms are images not only of
loneliness but of limited, self–enclosed, or even solipsistic
consciousness,13) and the essential gloss on all of them is the image of
the prison in Part V of The Waste Land:
I have heard the key

Turn in the door and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison. (ll.
413–416) 14)
This fear of solipsism lies behind one of the poem's most famous couplets:
In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo. (ll. 13–14, 35–36)
We assume that their conversation is silly and trivial, although Prufrock

says nothing to suggest that this is the case. Perhaps we come to this
conclusion because of the bathetic and comic rhyme; certainly our feeling
is reinforced, consciously or subconsciously, by the poem's recurrent
images of personal isolation and failed communication, as in Prufrock's and
the woman's cross–purposes.
The poem's images of isolation and self–enclosure suggest that Prufrock's
ultimate fear is that all of his thoughts may be mere solipsistic
projections.15) That this is a real possibility in his own mind is implied by
his lurid and obviously extreme imagining of victimization and death—the
pinned insect, St. John the Baptist, the mermaids' victims in the last lines
of the poem. His solution in both the sexual and metaphysical domains is to
procrastinate: “And indeed there will be time” (ll. 23, 37).16)
[→page 177] The references to Marvell and Hamlet make clear that
procrastination is not a good choice, but delay has its advantages. It would
have been tempting twenty–five years ago to call this deferral and to make
Prufrock and Eliot into proto–deconstructionists, aware of the terrible gap
between signifier and signified. This has been seriously argued, with good
evidence both from Eliot's philosophical and critical writings and from the
poems17); when Prufrock says, “It is impossible to say just what I mean” (l.
104), he may mean exactly that in purely linguistic terms. In an essay on
Eliot's early poetry, J. C. C. Mays claims that Eliot's starting–point “takes
breakdown for granted” and “supposes that will cannot obtain its object
and that theme and technique cannot be reconciled in any meaningful way”
(110). Mays wisely refrains from invoking an anachronistic deconstruction,
and it is clear that Eliot was influenced by far older traditions of skepticism
about language. His reading in the work of Nagarjuna, so ably analyzed by
Cleo McNelly Kearns, suggested that reality can best be described by a
complex system of double negation (not this, not that, not not–this,
not not–that), and Christian apophatic theology asserted that “any attempt
to specify the characteristics or mode of being of the divine is not simply
inadequate, which would be a truism, but essentially misleading and even
false, because divinity is so far beyond the categories of human
understanding as to make them a hindrance rather than a help to its
apprehension” (Kearns, T.S. Eliot 135, 131).18)
Indian linguistic philosophy, apophatic theology, and deconstruction may
only be more sophisticated versions of Addie Bundren's claim in
Faulkner's As I Lay Dying “that words are no good; that words don't ever
fit even what they are trying to say at” (115). If “Prufrock” merely drew
attention to the shortcomings of language, however, it would not be one of
the central poems of the twentieth century. It remains vital because it
dramatizes eloquently several aspects of modernity. The most important of
these is the modern sense of intellectual incoherence, the fear that all the
great systems which made sense of the world, from religion to Newtonian
physics, can no longer command our adherence. That Eliot “takes
breakdown for granted” is apparent not only in the form of his early poetry
but [→page 178] also in the actual inability of many of his speakers to
think in any consequential way at all. When Gerontion describes himself as
“A dull head among windy spaces,” we have gone beyond the shortcomings
of language or personal indecisiveness—Hamlet's “resolution […] sicklied
o'er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.84–85)—and are back in the world of
Pascal's eternal silence of the infinite spaces; similarly, when one of the
Thames–Daughters in The Waste Land confesses “I can connect / Nothing
with nothing” (ll. 301–02), personal crisis becomes general. This breakdown
of thought leads, naturally, to inaction, and the general passivity of Eliot's
early personae reflects a pervasive modern sense of bafflement and
paralysis which we recognize in Ford's Dowell (in The Good Soldier),
Kafka's Josef K., and the sometimes literally immobile protagonists in
Beckett. That Eliot had experienced this sort of breakdown personally
confirms Mays's statement that Eliot “translated the sad accidents of his
own life into poetry in a way that miraculously contained the exultation and
despair of a generation” (110–11).
Eliot as the pathologist of modern life is not news; I mention these truisms
only to emphasize that ellipsis and avoidance occur in “Prufrock” not
simply because language is an unstable medium, an idea Eliot returned to
obsessively in his poetry (most notably in Four Quartets), but because of a
far deeper problem. I also want to suggest that Prufrock's deferral of both
sex and the overwhelming question—the coyness mentioned earlier—has a
more positive significance. It is impossible to say what he means in part
because that meaning must not be stated. And this takes us back, as
everything in this paper seems to do, to sex.
In Modernism, Memory and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Gabrielle
McIntire notes that in Eliot's early poetry, “male–female relations are
distressingly undesirable. Yet, although they are usually more disquieting
than attractive, verging on gothic rather than enchanting, Eliot diligently
returns to female figures in every single poem in the Prufrock volume”
(90). McIntire suggests that “the female body stands in as a metaphor for
memory and history in ways that anticipate this figuration in 'Gerontion,'”
and I agree with her, but I want to go in a [→page 179] rather different
direction with her observation about the undesirability of desire. If sex and
metaphysics are analogous, then coitus or climax is analogous to the
resolution or conclusion of a discussion or argument. If Prufrock fears
sexual failure, he also fears intellectual failure (mockery,
miscommunication, oversimplification, actual solipsism) and prefers not to
try.
And it is here that my second subject, aposiopesis, becomes vitally
important as a strategy of pseudo–engagement and real delay. If ellipsis in
“Prufrock” is, as I have argued, a form of reticence about things Prufrock
takes for granted or is reluctant to discuss, then aposiopesis, the trope of
breaking–off, suggests unwillingness or inability to continue in the face of a
more immediate threat, that of consecutive thought that might actually
lead to a conclusion. If desire is undesirable, as McIntire says, so is
thinking, and Prufrock has developed ploys to circumvent it, or at least the
kind of discourse that usually represents it. These ploys are all forms of
aposiopesis in one way or another in that they break off a potential
discussion, and the means employed range from forthright deflection (“Oh,
do not ask 'What is it?,'” l. 11) to abrupt changes of topic and scene (from a
roomful of women to the yellow fog, from an imagined erotic encounter to
thoughts about Hamlet and Polonius) to the displacement of discussion by
the many rhetorical but nevertheless real questions in the poem. The
technique, “as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”
(l. 105), famously avoids sequence in favour of collage or bricolage; it also
remains faithful to the vagaries of modern consciousness. I do not intend to
examine the mechanics of aposiopesis, which are fairly straightforward in
all the poem's discontinuities, but to place the trope in the context of
Prufrock's coyness and procrastination, and Eliot's early poetry and
thought, as concisely as possible, and to suggest why the avoidance of
conclusions is desirable not only for Prufrock but for Eliot.19)
If we look again at “Gerontion,” for example, we find the same conjunction
of physical anxieties (this time the result of real rather than anticipated
age), sexual obsession, and metaphysical speculation. The central verse
paragraph of the poem, as McIntire has shown, is an [→page
180] extended double–entendre on the themes of sexual consummation
and epistemology (see McIntire 44).20) In the next verse paragraph,
Gerontion confesses to failure in both areas:
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils. (ll. 48–53)
The stiffening is finally rigor mortis, but in the short term it is both the
stiffness of old age and of tumescence, and the failure to conclude either
sexually or metaphysically is a source of relief for Gerontion. In a “new
year” of “juvescence” and restored vitality, “Christ the tiger”—from
Blake via Henry James's “Beast in the Jungle”—would make his leap and,
like Rilke confronted with the torso of Apollo, Gerontion would have to
change his life.21) This is also part of Prufrock's dilemma. Like the
inhabitants of The Waste Land, Gerontion would prefer not to alter his
present life even as he sees its sterility, but he insists rightly that his talk
is not futile, and I want to suggest that the inconclusiveness of both
Prufrock and Gerontion is not simply an enactment of ellipsis by means of
aposiopesis, but a positive agenda of avoidance facilitated by
aposiopesis.
Recent studies of Eliot's philosophical position in the 1910s suggest that
he saw all binaries as human constructions, necessarily relational within
an ambivalent whole.22) Any “conclusion,” then, shuts down alternate
possibilities that may have merit and partial truth; the important thing is to
go on talking, keeping alive a sense of the complexities of any issue,
forestalling or disrupting consensus, which can become deadening in the
intellectual sphere and tyrannical in the political. If neither “Prufrock” nor
“Gerontion” shows us that discussion, it is because Eliot dramatizes the
situation, not the prosaic details; he famously disliked any poetry of ideas,
and dismissed Browning and Tennyson, who “ruminated” on the same great
philosophical and religious issues that Eliot's speakers so pointedly avoid
(cf. Eliot, [→page 181] “The Metaphysical Poets” 288). When Eliot praised
Henry James's mind for being “so fine that no idea could violate it” (“In
Memory of Henry James” 2), he meant what he said; he also observed that
poetry should not embody a philosophy but replace it (see “The Possibility
of a Poetic Drama” 68). This does not mean, of course, that poetry should
be free of ideas, but that they must be expressed in image or situation
rather than discursively, or at least framed indirectly and tentatively and
with due regard to the possibility of error and the subjectivity of the
speaker. (This leads to what some see, wrongly, as elephantine
discriminations in Four Quartets.) If “Prufrock” is a poem of fragments and
of erotic embarrassment, a poem of longing for escape from sexual and
cosmic loneliness, it is also a poem haunted by the fear of conclusion, and
this is perhaps the true significance of Prufrock's scenarios of being
pinned, beheaded, or drowned. The alternative is to hold in suspension
various possibilities, just as Prufrock contains within himself both genders,
and the strategy of aposiopesis is vital in accomplishing this end.
As with the opening simile and the pairing of sex and metaphysics, we
have another dyad which is held together only by Prufrock's
consciousness. Prufrock wants both to address and to avoid answering
the overwhelming question, and this results in paralysis. Eliot's early
poetry is obviously not optimistic, but it is bracing in its clear–sightedness,
and it is positive in that it keeps hope alive; if nothing is certain or
concluded, nothing can be ruled out, including God and meaning. The way
out of the intellectual impasse of inconclusiveness was Eliot's subject
after The Waste Land; it involved, among other things, a recognition of the
futility of thought and, depending on your point of view, self–surrender and
humility or (to the cynical) giving up. It is, in any case, beyond the scope of
this paper.
***
In “Prufrock,” then, what I have called the Grand Ellipsis—Prufrock's
inability or refusal to articulate the overwhelming question—is adumbrated
in the smaller ellipses of the poem that omit connections between the
tenor and vehicle of a simile or metaphor, between the [→page 182] large
subjects of discussion (sex and metaphysics), and between incompatible
aspects of Prufrock himself: male vs. female characteristics, the desire
for sexual pursuit vs. inertia and fear of failure, the need to discuss large
metaphysical issues vs. the fear of mockery, miscommunication, or
solipsism, as well as the vital need to keep all possible conclusions in play.
The missing connectors in each case are Prufrock's mind and personality,
in which disparate and often contrary elements coexist as they do in the
work of the Metaphysical poets Eliot admired. Instead of connections, we
have elision and complexity within Prufrock himself: his gender identity
embraces opposites, and possibly incompatible ideas coexist in the space
before conclusion because he is unwilling to sacrifice any of them quite
yet.
Despite his preoccupation with sex, Prufrock manages to avoid coitus not
only because he doesn't get the girl, but also because all forms of
coming–together are deliberately and in one sense fortunately and
creatively absent from all the elements of the poem that I have been
discussing. This frustration of coitus (I would like to call it interruptus, but
in fact it never begins) is facilitated by Prufrock's and Eliot's use of ellipsis
and aposiopesis, omission and abrupt change of topic, which draws
attention not only to the gaps in Prufrock's monologue but to the
breakdown of the sensus communis, of systems, and of coherent
consciousness itself in the modern world: “On Margate Sands. / I can
connect / Nothing with nothing.”
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
Alfred Prufrock”
Edward Lobb

them.

120–21) 2)
alienation:
panes,
panes,
chimneys,
22)

“Prufrock.”

streets
windows? ...

frightening place?

flicker
snicker,





question”:



413–416) 14)

try.

Think at last
aposiopesis.
this paper.
***
yet.
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario

Alfred Prufrock”
Edward Lobb

them.

120–21) 2)
alienation:
panes,
panes,
chimneys,
22)

“Prufrock.”

streets
windows? ...

frightening place?

flicker
snicker,





question”:



413–416) 14)

try.

Think at last
aposiopesis.
this paper.
***
yet.
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario

Alfred Prufrock”
Edward Lobb

them.

120–21) 2)
alienation:
panes,
panes,
chimneys,
22)

“Prufrock.”

streets
windows? ...

frightening place?

flicker
snicker,




question”:


413–416) 14)


try.

Think at last
aposiopesis.
this paper.
***
yet.
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario

Alfred Prufrock”
Edward Lobb

them.
120–21) 2)
alienation:
panes,
panes,
chimneys,
22)

“Prufrock.”

streets
windows? ...

frightening place?

flicker
snicker,





question”:



413–416) 14)


try.

Think at last
aposiopesis.
this paper.
***
yet.
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
by T. S. Eliot
Cover page of The Egoist, Ltd.'s publication of Prufrock and Other
Observations (1917)
Original title Prufrock Among the Women
First published in June 1915 issue of Poetry[2]
Country United States
Language English
Publisher magazine (1915): Harriet Monroe
chapbook (1917): The Egoist, Ltd. (London)[1]
Lines 140
Pages 6 (1915 printing)[2]
8 (1917 printing)[1]
Full text
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at Wikisource
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is

the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S.
Eliot (1888–1965). The poem relates the varying thoughts of its title character
in a stream of consciousness. Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910,
and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse[2] at the instigation of fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound. It was
later printed as part of a twelve-poem chapbook entitled Prufrock and Other
Observations in 1917.[1] At the time of its publication, "Prufrock" was
considered outlandish,[3] but the poem is now seen as heralding a
paradigmatic shift in poetry from late 19th-century Romanticism and Georgian
lyrics to Modernism.
The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading
of Dante Alighieri[4] and makes several references to the Bible and other
literary works—including William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV Part
II, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet; the poetry of seventeenth-century metaphysical
poet Andrew Marvell; and the nineteenth-century French Symbolists. Eliot
narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness
technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as
a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban
man stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action
that is said "to epitomize [the] frustration and impotence of the modern
individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment".[5]
Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in
his life, and lack of spiritual progress, and is haunted by reminders of
unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret,
embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay,
and an awareness of aging and mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the
most recognized voices in modern literature.[6]
Composition and publication history[edit]
T. S. Eliot in 1923, photographed by

Lady Ottoline Morrell
Writing and first publication[edit]
Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" between February 1910 and
July or August 1911. Shortly after arriving in England to attend Merton
College, Oxford, Eliot was introduced to American expatriate poet Ezra
Pound, who instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and aided the start of
Eliot's career. Pound served as the overseas editor of Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse and recommended to the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe,
that Poetry publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", extolling that Eliot
and his work embodied a new and unique phenomenon among contemporary
writers. Pound claimed that Eliot "has actually trained himself AND
modernized himself on his own. The rest of the promising young have done
one or the other, but never both."[7] The poem was first published by the
magazine in its June 1915 issue.[2][8]
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.[9]: 297 In June 1917 The
Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, published a pamphlet
entitled Prufrock and Other Observations (London), containing 12 poems by
Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was the first in the volume.[1] Eliot
was appointed assistant editor of the Egoist in June 1917.[9]: 290
Prufrock's Pervigilium[edit]
According to Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon, while Eliot was writing the first
drafts of "Prufrock" in his notebook in 1910–1911, he intentionally kept four
pages blank in the middle section of the poem.[10] According to the notebooks,
now in the collection of the New York Public Library, Eliot finished the poem,
which was originally published sometime in July and August 1911, when he
was 22 years old.[11] In 1912, Eliot revised the poem and included a 38-line
section now called "Prufrock's Pervigilium" which was inserted on those blank
pages, and intended as a middle section for the poem.[10] However, Eliot
removed this section soon after seeking the advice of his fellow Harvard
acquaintance and poet Conrad Aiken.[12] This section would not be included in
the original publication of Eliot's poem but was included when published
posthumously in the 1996 collection of Eliot's early, unpublished drafts
in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917.
[11] This Pervigilium section describes the "vigil" of Prufrock through an evening
and night[11]: 41, 43–44, 176–90 described by one reviewer as an "erotic foray into the
narrow streets of a social and emotional underworld" that portray "in clammy
detail Prufrock's tramping 'through certain half-deserted streets' and the
context of his 'muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap
hotels.'"[13]
Critical reception[edit]
Critical publications initially dismissed the poem. An unsigned review in The

Times Literary Supplement from 1917 found: "The fact that these things
occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to
anyone – even to himself. They certainly have no relation to 'poetry,' [...]."[14]
[15] Another unsigned review from the same year imagined Eliot saying "I'll just
put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock.'"[3]
The Harvard Vocarium at Harvard College recorded Eliot's reading

of Prufrock and other poems in 1947, as part of its ongoing series of poetry
readings by its authors.[16]
Description[edit]
Title[edit]
In his early drafts, Eliot gave the poem the subtitle "Prufrock among the
Women."[11]: 41 This subtitle was apparently discarded before publication. Eliot
called the poem a "love song" in reference to Rudyard Kipling's poem "The
Love Song of Har Dyal", first published in Kipling's collection Plain Tales from
the Hills (1888).[17] In 1959, Eliot addressed a meeting of the Kipling Society
and discussed the influence of Kipling upon his own poetry:
Traces of Kipling appear in my own mature verse where no
diligent scholarly sleuth has yet observed them, but
which I am myself prepared to disclose. I once wrote a
poem called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": I am
convinced that it would never have been called "Love
Song" but for a title of Kipling's that stuck obstinately
in my head: "The Love Song of Har Dyal".[17]
However, the origin of the name Prufrock is not certain, and Eliot never
remarked on its origin other than to claim he was unsure of how he came
upon the name. Many scholars and indeed Eliot himself have pointed towards
the autobiographical elements in the character of Prufrock, and Eliot at the
time of writing the poem was in the habit of rendering his name as "T. Stearns
Eliot", very similar in form to that of J. Alfred Prufrock.[18] It is suggested that
the name "Prufrock" came from Eliot's youth in St. Louis, Missouri, where the
Prufrock-Litton Company, a large furniture store, occupied one city block
downtown at 420–422 North Fourth Street.[19][20][21] In a 1950 letter, Eliot said: "I
did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any
recollection of having acquired this name in any way, but I think that it must be
assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated."[22]
Epigraph[edit]
The draft version of the poem's epigraph comes from

Dante's Purgatorio (XXVI, 147–148):[11]: 39, 41
'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor'. 'be mindful in due time of my pain'.
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina. Then dived he back into that fire which refines them.[23]
He finally decided not to use this, but eventually used the quotation in the
closing lines of his 1922 poem The Waste Land. The quotation that Eliot did
choose comes from Dante also. Inferno (XXVII, 61–66) reads:
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse If I but thought that my response were made
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, to one perhaps returning to the world,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. this tongue of flame would cease to flicker.
Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo But since, up from these depths, no one has yet
Non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, returned alive, if what I hear is true,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo. I answer without fear of being shamed.[24]
In context, the epigraph refers to a meeting between Dante

Alighieri and Guido da Montefeltro, who was condemned to the eighth circle of
Hell for providing counsel to Pope Boniface VIII, who wished to use Guido's
advice for a nefarious undertaking. This encounter follows Dante's meeting
with Ulysses, who himself is also condemned to the circle of the Fraudulent.
According to Ron Banerjee, the epigraph serves to cast ironic light on
Prufrock's intent. 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. One is the storyteller; the other the listener who later
reveals the story to the world. He posits, alternatively, that the role of Guido in
the analogy is indeed filled by Prufrock, but that the role of Dante is filled by
the reader ("Let us go then, you and I"). In that, the reader is granted the
power to do as he pleases with Prufrock's love song.[26]
Themes and interpretation[edit]
Because the poem is concerned primarily with the irregular musings of the
narrator, it can be difficult to interpret. Laurence Perrine wrote, "[the poem]
presents the apparently random thoughts going through a person's head
within a certain time interval, in which the transitional links are psychological
rather than logical".[27] This stylistic choice makes it difficult to determine what
in the poem is literal and what is symbolic. On the surface, "The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock" relays the thoughts of a sexually frustrated middle-aged
man who wants to say something but is afraid to do so, and ultimately does
not.[27][28] The dispute, however, lies in to whom Prufrock is speaking, whether
he is actually going anywhere, what he wants to say, and to what the various
images refer.
The intended audience is not evident. Some believe that Prufrock is talking to
another person[29] or directly to the reader,[30] while others believe Prufrock's
monologue is internal. Perrine writes "The 'you and I' of the first line are
divided parts of Prufrock's own nature",[27] while professor emerita of
English Mutlu Konuk Blasing suggests that the "you and I" refers to the
relationship between the dilemmas of the character and the author.
[31] Similarly, critics dispute whether Prufrock is going somewhere during the
course of the poem. In the first half of the poem, Prufrock uses various
outdoor images and talks about how there will be time for various things
before "the taking of a toast and tea", and "time to turn back and descend the
stair." This has led many to believe that Prufrock is on his way to an afternoon
tea, where he is preparing to ask this "overwhelming question".[27] Others,
however, believe that Prufrock is not physically going anywhere, but instead is
imagining it in his mind.[30][31]
Perhaps the most significant dispute lies over the "overwhelming question"
that Prufrock is trying to ask. Many believe that Prufrock is trying to tell a
woman of his romantic interest in her,[27] pointing to the various images of
women's arms and clothing and the final few lines in which Prufrock laments
that mermaids will not sing to him. Others, however, believe that Prufrock is
trying to express some deeper philosophical insight or disillusionment with
society, but fears rejection, pointing to statements that express a
disillusionment with society, such as "I have measured out my life with coffee
spoons" (line 51). Many believe that the poem is a criticism
of Edwardian society and Prufrock's dilemma represents the inability to live a
meaningful existence in the modern world.[32] McCoy and Harlan wrote "For
many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and
impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires
and modern disillusionment."[30]
In general, Eliot uses imagery of aging and decay to represent Prufrock's self-
image.[27] For example, "When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like
a patient etherized upon a table" (lines 2–3), the "sawdust restaurants" and
"cheap hotels", the yellow fog, and the afternoon "Asleep...tired... or it
malingers" (line 77), are reminiscent of languor and decay, while Prufrock's
various concerns about his hair and teeth, as well as the mermaids "Combing
the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white
and black," show his concern over aging.
Use of allusion[edit]
Like many of Eliot's poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" makes
numerous allusions to other works, which are often symbolic themselves.
 In "Time for all the works and days of hands" (29) the phrase 'works and days' is the title
of a long poem – a description of agricultural life and a call to toil – by the early Greek
poet Hesiod.[27]
 "I know the voices dying with a dying fall" (52) echoes Orsino's first lines in William
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.[27]
 The prophet of "Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a
platter / I am no prophet — and here's no great matter" (81–2) is John the Baptist, whose
head was delivered to Salome by Herod as a reward for her dancing (Matthew 14:1–11,
and Oscar Wilde's play Salome).[27]
 "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (92) and "indeed there will be time" (23) echo
the closing lines of Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'. Other phrases such as, "there will be
time" and "there is time" are reminiscent of the opening line of that poem: "Had we but
world enough and time".[27]
 "'I am Lazarus, come from the dead'" (94) may be either the beggar Lazarus (of Luke 16)
returning on behalf of the rich man who was not permitted to return from the dead, to warn
the rich man's brothers about Hell, or the Lazarus (of John 11) whom Jesus Christ raised
from the dead, or both.[27]
 "Full of high sentence" (117) echoes Geoffrey Chaucer's description of the Clerk
of Oxford in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.[27]
 "There will be time to murder and create" is a biblical allusion to Ecclesiastes 3.[27]
 In the final section of the poem, Prufrock rejects the idea that he is Prince Hamlet,
suggesting that he is merely "an attendant lord" (112) whose purpose is to "advise the
prince" (114), a likely allusion to Polonius — Polonius being also "almost, at times, the
Fool."
 "Among some talk of you and me" may be[33] a reference to Quatrain 32 of Edward
FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam ("There was a Door to which I
found no Key / There was a Veil past which I could not see / Some little Talk awhile
of Me and Thee / There seemed — and then no more of Thee and Me.")
 "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each" has been suggested transiently to be a
poetic allusion to John Donne's "Song: Go and catch a falling star" or Gérard de
Nerval's "El Desdichado", and this discussion used to illustrate and explore the intentional
fallacy and the place of poet's intention in critical inquiry.[34]

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
by T. S. Eliot
Cover page of The Egoist, Ltd.'s publication of Prufrock and Other
Observations (1917)
Original title Prufrock Among the Women
First published in June 1915 issue of Poetry[2]
Country United States
Language English
Publisher magazine (1915): Harriet Monroe
chapbook (1917): The Egoist, Ltd. (London)[1]

Lines 140
Pages 6 (1915 printing)[2]
8 (1917 printing)[1]
Full text
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at Wikisource
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is

the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S.
Eliot (1888–1965). The poem relates the varying thoughts of its title character
in a stream of consciousness. Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910,
and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse[2] at the instigation of fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound. It was
later printed as part of a twelve-poem chapbook entitled Prufrock and Other
Observations in 1917.[1] At the time of its publication, "Prufrock" was
considered outlandish,[3] but the poem is now seen as heralding a
paradigmatic shift in poetry from late 19th-century Romanticism and Georgian
lyrics to Modernism.
The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading

of Dante Alighieri[4] and makes several references to the Bible and other
literary works—including William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV Part
II, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet; the poetry of seventeenth-century metaphysical
poet Andrew Marvell; and the nineteenth-century French Symbolists. Eliot
narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness
technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as
a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban
man stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action
that is said "to epitomize [the] frustration and impotence of the modern
individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment".[5]
Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in
his life, and lack of spiritual progress, and is haunted by reminders of
unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret,
embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay,
and an awareness of aging and mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the
most recognized voices in modern literature.[6]
Composition and publication history[edit]

T. S. Eliot in 1923, photographed by
Lady Ottoline Morrell
Writing and first publication[edit]
Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" between February 1910 and
July or August 1911. Shortly after arriving in England to attend Merton
College, Oxford, Eliot was introduced to American expatriate poet Ezra
Pound, who instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and aided the start of
Eliot's career. Pound served as the overseas editor of Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse and recommended to the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe,
that Poetry publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", extolling that Eliot
and his work embodied a new and unique phenomenon among contemporary
writers. Pound claimed that Eliot "has actually trained himself AND
modernized himself on his own. The rest of the promising young have done
one or the other, but never both."[7] The poem was first published by the
magazine in its June 1915 issue.[2][8]
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.[9]: 297 In June 1917 The
Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, published a pamphlet
entitled Prufrock and Other Observations (London), containing 12 poems by
Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was the first in the volume.[1] Eliot
was appointed assistant editor of the Egoist in June 1917.[9]: 290
Prufrock's Pervigilium[edit]
According to Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon, while Eliot was writing the first
drafts of "Prufrock" in his notebook in 1910–1911, he intentionally kept four
pages blank in the middle section of the poem.[10] According to the notebooks,
now in the collection of the New York Public Library, Eliot finished the poem,
which was originally published sometime in July and August 1911, when he
was 22 years old.[11] In 1912, Eliot revised the poem and included a 38-line
section now called "Prufrock's Pervigilium" which was inserted on those blank
pages, and intended as a middle section for the poem.[10] However, Eliot
removed this section soon after seeking the advice of his fellow Harvard
acquaintance and poet Conrad Aiken.[12] This section would not be included in
the original publication of Eliot's poem but was included when published
posthumously in the 1996 collection of Eliot's early, unpublished drafts
in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917.
[11] This Pervigilium section describes the "vigil" of Prufrock through an evening
and night[11]: 41, 43–44, 176–90 described by one reviewer as an "erotic foray into the
narrow streets of a social and emotional underworld" that portray "in clammy
detail Prufrock's tramping 'through certain half-deserted streets' and the
context of his 'muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap
hotels.'"[13]
Critical reception[edit]
Critical publications initially dismissed the poem. An unsigned review in The

Times Literary Supplement from 1917 found: "The fact that these things
occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to
anyone – even to himself. They certainly have no relation to 'poetry,' [...]."[14]
[15] Another unsigned review from the same year imagined Eliot saying "I'll just
put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock.'"[3]
The Harvard Vocarium at Harvard College recorded Eliot's reading

of Prufrock and other poems in 1947, as part of its ongoing series of poetry
readings by its authors.[16]
Description[edit]
Title[edit]
In his early drafts, Eliot gave the poem the subtitle "Prufrock among the
Women."[11]: 41 This subtitle was apparently discarded before publication. Eliot
called the poem a "love song" in reference to Rudyard Kipling's poem "The
Love Song of Har Dyal", first published in Kipling's collection Plain Tales from
the Hills (1888).[17] In 1959, Eliot addressed a meeting of the Kipling Society
and discussed the influence of Kipling upon his own poetry:
Traces of Kipling appear in my own mature verse where no
diligent scholarly sleuth has yet observed them, but
which I am myself prepared to disclose. I once wrote a
poem called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": I am
convinced that it would never have been called "Love
Song" but for a title of Kipling's that stuck obstinately
in my head: "The Love Song of Har Dyal".[17]
However, the origin of the name Prufrock is not certain, and Eliot never
remarked on its origin other than to claim he was unsure of how he came
upon the name. Many scholars and indeed Eliot himself have pointed towards
the autobiographical elements in the character of Prufrock, and Eliot at the
time of writing the poem was in the habit of rendering his name as "T. Stearns
Eliot", very similar in form to that of J. Alfred Prufrock.[18] It is suggested that
the name "Prufrock" came from Eliot's youth in St. Louis, Missouri, where the
Prufrock-Litton Company, a large furniture store, occupied one city block
downtown at 420–422 North Fourth Street.[19][20][21] In a 1950 letter, Eliot said: "I
did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any
recollection of having acquired this name in any way, but I think that it must be
assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated."[22]
Epigraph[edit]
The draft version of the poem's epigraph comes from

Dante's Purgatorio (XXVI, 147–148):[11]: 39, 41
'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor'. 'be mindful in due time of my pain'.
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina. Then dived he back into that fire which refines them.[23]
He finally decided not to use this, but eventually used the quotation in the
closing lines of his 1922 poem The Waste Land. The quotation that Eliot did
choose comes from Dante also. Inferno (XXVII, 61–66) reads:
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse If I but thought that my response were made
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, to one perhaps returning to the world,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. this tongue of flame would cease to flicker.
Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo But since, up from these depths, no one has yet
Non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, returned alive, if what I hear is true,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo. I answer without fear of being shamed.[24]
In context, the epigraph refers to a meeting between Dante

Alighieri and Guido da Montefeltro, who was condemned to the eighth circle of
Hell for providing counsel to Pope Boniface VIII, who wished to use Guido's
advice for a nefarious undertaking. This encounter follows Dante's meeting
with Ulysses, who himself is also condemned to the circle of the Fraudulent.
According to Ron Banerjee, the epigraph serves to cast ironic light on
Prufrock's intent. 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. One is the storyteller; the other the listener who later
reveals the story to the world. He posits, alternatively, that the role of Guido in
the analogy is indeed filled by Prufrock, but that the role of Dante is filled by
the reader ("Let us go then, you and I"). In that, the reader is granted the
power to do as he pleases with Prufrock's love song.[26]
Themes and interpretation[edit]
Because the poem is concerned primarily with the irregular musings of the
narrator, it can be difficult to interpret. Laurence Perrine wrote, "[the poem]
presents the apparently random thoughts going through a person's head
within a certain time interval, in which the transitional links are psychological
rather than logical".[27] This stylistic choice makes it difficult to determine what
in the poem is literal and what is symbolic. On the surface, "The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock" relays the thoughts of a sexually frustrated middle-aged
man who wants to say something but is afraid to do so, and ultimately does
not.[27][28] The dispute, however, lies in to whom Prufrock is speaking, whether
he is actually going anywhere, what he wants to say, and to what the various
images refer.
The intended audience is not evident. Some believe that Prufrock is talking to
another person[29] or directly to the reader,[30] while others believe Prufrock's
monologue is internal. Perrine writes "The 'you and I' of the first line are
divided parts of Prufrock's own nature",[27] while professor emerita of
English Mutlu Konuk Blasing suggests that the "you and I" refers to the
relationship between the dilemmas of the character and the author.
[31] Similarly, critics dispute whether Prufrock is going somewhere during the
course of the poem. In the first half of the poem, Prufrock uses various
outdoor images and talks about how there will be time for various things
before "the taking of a toast and tea", and "time to turn back and descend the
stair." This has led many to believe that Prufrock is on his way to an afternoon
tea, where he is preparing to ask this "overwhelming question".[27] Others,
however, believe that Prufrock is not physically going anywhere, but instead is
imagining it in his mind.[30][31]
Perhaps the most significant dispute lies over the "overwhelming question"
that Prufrock is trying to ask. Many believe that Prufrock is trying to tell a
woman of his romantic interest in her,[27] pointing to the various images of
women's arms and clothing and the final few lines in which Prufrock laments
that mermaids will not sing to him. Others, however, believe that Prufrock is
trying to express some deeper philosophical insight or disillusionment with
society, but fears rejection, pointing to statements that express a
disillusionment with society, such as "I have measured out my life with coffee
spoons" (line 51). Many believe that the poem is a criticism
of Edwardian society and Prufrock's dilemma represents the inability to live a
meaningful existence in the modern world.[32] McCoy and Harlan wrote "For
many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and
impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires
and modern disillusionment."[30]
In general, Eliot uses imagery of aging and decay to represent Prufrock's self-
image.[27] For example, "When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like
a patient etherized upon a table" (lines 2–3), the "sawdust restaurants" and
"cheap hotels", the yellow fog, and the afternoon "Asleep...tired... or it
malingers" (line 77), are reminiscent of languor and decay, while Prufrock's
various concerns about his hair and teeth, as well as the mermaids "Combing
the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white
and black," show his concern over aging.
Use of allusion[edit]
Like many of Eliot's poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" makes
numerous allusions to other works, which are often symbolic themselves.
 In "Time for all the works and days of hands" (29) the phrase 'works and days' is the title
of a long poem – a description of agricultural life and a call to toil – by the early Greek
poet Hesiod.[27]
 "I know the voices dying with a dying fall" (52) echoes Orsino's first lines in William
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.[27]
 The prophet of "Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a
platter / I am no prophet — and here's no great matter" (81–2) is John the Baptist, whose
head was delivered to Salome by Herod as a reward for her dancing (Matthew 14:1–11,
and Oscar Wilde's play Salome).[27]
 "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (92) and "indeed there will be time" (23) echo
the closing lines of Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'. Other phrases such as, "there will be
time" and "there is time" are reminiscent of the opening line of that poem: "Had we but
world enough and time".[27]
 "'I am Lazarus, come from the dead'" (94) may be either the beggar Lazarus (of Luke 16)
returning on behalf of the rich man who was not permitted to return from the dead, to warn
the rich man's brothers about Hell, or the Lazarus (of John 11) whom Jesus Christ raised
from the dead, or both.[27]
 "Full of high sentence" (117) echoes Geoffrey Chaucer's description of the Clerk
of Oxford in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.[27]
 "There will be time to murder and create" is a biblical allusion to Ecclesiastes 3.[27]
 In the final section of the poem, Prufrock rejects the idea that he is Prince Hamlet,
suggesting that he is merely "an attendant lord" (112) whose purpose is to "advise the
prince" (114), a likely allusion to Polonius — Polonius being also "almost, at times, the
Fool."
 "Among some talk of you and me" may be[33] a reference to Quatrain 32 of Edward
FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam ("There was a Door to which I
found no Key / There was a Veil past which I could not see / Some little Talk awhile
of Me and Thee / There seemed — and then no more of Thee and Me.")
 "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each" has been suggested transiently to be a
poetic allusion to John Donne's "Song: Go and catch a falling star" or Gérard de
Nerval's "El Desdichado", and this discussion used to illustrate and explore the intentional
fallacy and the place of poet's intention in critical inquiry.[34]
From the title itself to the ominously cryptic ending, in which an anonymous “we” drowns in sea of human
voices, the poetry of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” continues to challenge readers’ expectations
both of what constitutes poetry and what constitutes meaning. Does this “we,” for example, truly drown in a
sea of human voices, or does it drown in some other sort of sea because those voices have awakened it, and
if so, from what, and what, then, is that other sea? And why the editorial “we,” anyhow, when it is clear that
Prufrock has been speaking till that moment of and for himself? But has he been? The poem opens, after all,
with that invitation to “you and I,” a definite “we” again, no doubt, but not one that can be easily identified.
Rather, the further the poem proceeds, the more it seems as if Prufrock is speaking to no one but himself,
since one of the points that he continually stresses is that no one will listen to him in any case, no matter
what he says or does.
Those are just a few of the problems that the poem poses for readers to this day, and yet its enduring
reputation as a masterwork of 20th-century literature serves as a reminder that the work endures not because
of its critical reputation, which is considerable, or because of its difficulties, which are equally so, but
because of its great beauty as a work expressing what Eliot would later call a permanent human impulse. To
give that permanent human impulse a body, Eliot would argue, is the function of poetry. Prufrock is just
such a body.
BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS
How so young and comparatively isolated a poet came to write one of the most famous poems of the early
20th century, itself one of the most productive periods of literary accomplishments and advances in English
since the time of Shakespeare, remains something of a mystery. It is not atypical for a perfectly ordinary
combination of experiences and opportunities to have an extraordinary result. In the case of “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the primary shaping events seem to have been an unusually refined sensibility
matched with a high, and highly educated, intelligence and an extremely dry wit. Eliot would later argue that
one may never be certain what combination of perfectly everyday activities can nevertheless be altered, in
the creative mind, into art, or into what he termed art emotions.
Since Eliot wrote the poem after having spent some time in BOSTON, Massachusetts, and environs as a
student, first at Milton Academy and later at Harvard College, it is easy to associate the poem’s social
milieu, as redolent of a drawing-room society as it is, with that New England city, renowned to this day for
being a socially upright and closed community. (Although it may be that reference, in the opening stanza, to
oyster shells that brings a seaside town like Boston to mind.) We know, for example, that while Eliot was
not himself a proper Bostonian, having been born to an old New England family but in the comparative
wilds of ST. LOUIS, Missouri, the Eliots were a prominent, upper-middle-class family. So Eliot knew a
world of morning coats and of afternoon teas and polite conversation about the arts and all the other finer
things in life, including well-behaved if not even aloof young women.
Eliot’s would have been a world, in other words, where matters of manners and decorum took precedence
over more common human impulses, such as sexual desire, perhaps, not to mention something as simple as
the longing for the natural ease of human interaction without the constraints of social proprieties. The young
Eliot would himself have inhabited a world where the longing to let one’s hair, and guard, down in formal
social settings was very likely frowned on.
The reader must be careful, however, not to associate the poet’s own life too much with the material of the
poem. This is particularly true in Eliot’s case, for he spent much critical ink arguing for a separation between
the person and the poem. In the case of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” it is fair to assume that Eliot
is dealing with a relatively commonplace theme, and that is, again, the conflicts that are created when natural
human impulses for dialogue and community are frustrated by rigid social norms. Where Eliot’s treatment of
this thematic commonplace is lifted to a new level of poetic expression, thus making it a modernist
achievement, is found in his approaching such a serious, and potentially pretentious, theme from an angle so
aslant that the social criticism, real or implied, is obscured by the absurdity of Prufrock’s predicament, and
for that Eliot has his education in the literary traditions of continental Europe, rather than just those of
Britain and America, to thank.
The young Eliot knew that world of real Boston tea parties, to be sure, but, thanks to the traditions of a
liberal education in which he had been taught and to a mother who had an abiding interest in Italian
Renaissance culture, he also knew the world that had produced a literary classic such as Dante’s Divine
Comedy, from which the epigraph to “Prufrock” would be taken, as well as the world of the other foreign
ingredient in this tale of what both nurture and influence can produce in the way of a literary achievement.
That would be his near contemporaries, the French symbolist poets, in particular Jules Laforgue, for whom
language and learning were as likely to be intellectual toys as meaningful tools. If Eliot had come to know
his Dante largely through formal education, he came to know Laforgue and the French symbolist movement
in general from a 1908 encounter with a book by Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
“Prufrock” the work and Prufrock the personage represent the end of an era and an order, the period from the
Revolutionary War to the beginnings of World War I during which Americans, with few exceptions, and
those being the very rich and privileged, were by and large isolated from their literary and cultural roots in
Europe and glad of it. Eliot implicitly underscores this shift back to a more Eurocentric worldview on the
part of young, educated Americans by using a late medieval Italian poet, Dante, to create the atmosphere for
the poem’s tone and mood, and by then turning to contemporary French poets, and French thinking in
general, to find a more expansive range of poetic language and a fractured and thereby freed poetical
grammar in and by which to convey that tone and mood.
Indeed, though he had been experimenting with poetry writing throughout his undergraduate years, Eliot,
recently graduated from Harvard, was spending his first year abroad in Paris during the fall of 1910 and well
into 1911 when he wrote “Prufrock.” For any young, privileged American of his time and his class,
immersion not so much in Europe as in the so-called City of Light, with its Latinate, Roman Catholic roots
so alien to Eliot’s Anglo-American, Protestant background and upbringing, and with the French capital’s
equally suspect reputation among Americans as a libertine city of sexual and social license also alien to
Eliot’s Puritan moral bearings, was a rite of passage not to be ignored or dismissed. Nor should it be
forgotten that Paris was also a major cultural mecca for young Americans seeking to overcome the
somewhat unpolished rawness of the American experience with a good dose of the sort of sophistication and
learning that only the Old World could provide.
This was a particularly exciting time to be in Paris. The social and political ferment for which the French
have always been renowned had overflowed into the aesthetic and philosophical realms. On the latter front,
Eliot attended lectures at the Sorbonne, studying the work of the French philosopher Henr i Ber gson and the
conservative political and spiritual thinking of Charles Maurras. He also struck up a friendship with a young
Frenchman, Jules Verdenal, to whom he would subsequently dedicate his first volume of poetry, Prufrock
and Other Observations, the title of the volume serving readers notice that this would be a poetry not of
personal expression but of impression and reaction. The frenetic literary life of the French capital would also
provide the incentive, the catalyst for experimentation and change. We are encouraged to think of literary
modernism as a time in which literature, but particularly poetry, renewed itself. But despite the innovative
work of Eliot’s American precursors such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, poetry had first renewed
itself not in America or even Britain but in France during the latter half of the 19th century.
Eliot was already quite familiar with the work of French poets Arthur Rimbaud, CHARLES BAUDELAIRE,
and Jules Laforgue, thanks again in large part to Symons’s landmark study in English on these French
symbolist poets. Their new kind of poetry, for the French, focused on the city and on the plight of the
intellect, the will, and the spirit of modern city-dwellers, young, sophisticated, and well-educated but
nevertheless overwhelmed by impersonal public and social demands in conflict with personal confusions and
general chaos—individuals awash in a sea of contending private emotions and desires in a world of
bureaucrats and paradox. Uniquely and together, these French poets, far more than either their English or
American counterparts, had fashioned a poetic tool that, without sacrificing any poet’s first concerns, which
are for language and uncensored self-expression, could comment nevertheless on a culture gone awry.
Whatever else may have drawn the young Eliot to the composition of poetry in the first place, he found his
mentors in these poets, Laforgue primarily, who seemed, for all their foreignness otherwise, to share his eye
for finding the famished soul in the midst of life’s increasingly materialist feast.
Is it any wonder, then, that Eliot dishes up, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem that is like
nothing that had ever come before it in English? It is as if the freedom that he was experiencing in Paris
combined with the liberating spirit of the times, inasmuch as poetic expression was concerned, and the result
was a poem that expressed a yearning for freedom and liberation in the language and settings of all the
traditional social and cultural constraints to which Eliot, scion of an old, established, and prominent New
England family, had become accustomed.
In conceptualizing “Prufrock,” in other words, Eliot is able to play on his special knowledge as the insider to
use the techniques of an outside culture, the French, to criticize the inside culture.
A part of the great irony of the poem is that its speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock, is also an insider whose crisis is
created by the fact that he feels like an outsider within his own small if not in fact tight social circle, an
individual burdened with an immense social discomfort and riddled with both a fear of failure and a
reluctance to upset the apple cart of his own sense of alienation. This doubling effect, precarious though it
may be, is used to immense advantage by Eliot throughout the poem, which so perfectly matches topic and
technique, for example, that it seems more a poetic exercise than a poetic statement, putting the reader
continuously on guard but off his or her game, as it were.
SYNOPSIS
The Title and Epigraph
So pervasive are Eliot’s techniques and reputation by now that readers nowadays fail to realize how startling
it might have been to an English-language reader of the time to come across a serious poem by an American
poet with a title as silly-sounding as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and an epigraph in a foreign
language, its source unidentified, yet one that turns out to be from the pages of the first part of
Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno— that is, from the depths of hell itself. This literary classic would
hardly have been an unknown commodity in academic circles, but given its Italianate, papist leanings, it
would hardly have been thought of as mainstream, popular literature. For Eliot to cite it without any other
species of textual citation was therefore either a daring or a thoughtless act— unless the very act of leaving
his readers in the dark as to the epigraph’s source served the purposes of the direction and the purpose of the
original poetry to come.
To appreciate any Eliot poem, at least from the early periods of his career, readers need to understand Eliot’s
most transparent literary technique, and that is his ability to mix up the most serious with the most frivolous
elements without either warning or much indication as to which is which. For now, however, it is important
to observe in that particular mixing of the absurd (Prufrock’s name), with the ominous (an epigraph from a
poem about hall) that only someone who knew intimately the life and lifestyle that was about to be portrayed
in the poem could so thoroughly and simultaneously both echo and betray that world’s values.
This dilemma is established as early as the poem’s title and epigraph. Readers regarding the title of the poem
for the first time undoubtedly come up against a series of expectations that are no sooner set in motion than
dashed. Whatever the idea of a love song may be in the most general terms, no one is likely to be thrilled at
hearing that it is the love song of a man named J. Alfred Prufrock. Indeed, such a name reads more like
something found on a calling card than in the title of an composition as intimate as a love song. Lovers, after
all, do not refer to each other by their legal or formal names, unless it is out of some species of skewed
affection, nor is a man who goes by a moniker as presumptuous as J. Alfred, with its profound hints of
stuffed-shirtedness, likely to give the automatic impression that he should be either the subject or the
originator of a love song.
Whatever readers may make of all these troubling matters (even if it is only at that unconscious, subliminal
level where Eliot the critic will later say the poem does its real work on us), they have been thrown off guard
and invariably puzzled as to what sort of a love song they should be prepared to find as the poem begins. A
comic turn or parody? Pretentious nonsense?
Yet, before the poem begins, that strange—in the sense that it is literally foreign—epigraph intervenes. To
learn that it is a passage from Dante’s Inferno works against the apparent air of a frivolity that has been
established by the poem’s contradictory title. The epigraph also poses a puzzle until its source is identified
and its words are translated from Italian into English, and this should be taken as the poet’s (not the speaker,
a crucial distinction as far as the dramatic monologue is concerned) warning to the reader to be wary. All is
not as it seems.
Once translated, the epigraph may seem enlightening, but even that is only at first glance. Specifically, the
words are spoken to Dante, who has made himself the protagonist of his own poem, by a man named Guido
da Montefeltro, who is being punished in the Eighth Circle of the Inferno, or pretty deep down in hell, for
having given false counsel. These sinners are among the fraudulent in Dante’s scheme of things infernal, and
for having abused the gift of human speech to deceive and, so, abused the good faith of others, these
particular sinners, Guido among them, are imprisoned forever in tongues of fire, emblematic of speech,
which is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Encountering and recognizing him, Dante wants to hear Guido’s story of
how he came to be here among those damned eternally to hell, whereupon Guido, cautious about
besmirching whatever good name he might still have among the living, tells Dante, “If I were to believe that
I was speaking to anyone who would ever return to the world, this flame would cease to stir any further, but
since no one ever returned alive from these depths, if what I hear is true, then without fear of infamy I
respond to you.”
Before jumping to conclusions, the reader should be warned that this is a highly textured passage in its
original context alone. A quick take on the epigraph, once it has been deciphered, could lead the unwary
reader to conclude that the poetry to come that the epigraph is ostensibly introducing should be read in the
context of someone who imagines himself to be in hell, or at least a hellish situation. Such a conclusion,
while it may have possibilities, would be hasty nevertheless. For one thing, the passage for Dante’s purposes
alone is full of dramatic ironies—the speaker, Guido da Montefeltro, is a liar, after all, surrounded in hell by
other liars, not to mention the fact that hell’s master, Satan, is called the father of lies. Yet with incredulity,
Guido imagines that what he has heard is “true.” Who is he kidding—himself or Dante? For another thing,
Guido has figured wrong in Dante’s case. Ironically, the person to whom Guido then proceeds, without fear
of infamy, to tell the tale of his treachery turns out, in the fiction Dante has created, to be not only someone
who will return to the world of the living but who is also a poet who will then write, in the Divine
Comedy, an account of all that he has seen and heard, including, of course, this confession of Guido’s that
has been given in the strictest confidence.
Once put into such a complex context of the compounded ironies of the deceiver deceived, the Eliot epigraph
from Dante obscures rather than clarifies the coming poetry’s tone or meaning, unless, that is, the reader puts
the significance of the epigraph into the broadest possible context. In that zone of reference, the reader is
encouraged to recognize two primary principles of human communication: that to be able to understand
someone, one must know the language that the other is speaking, either literally (Dante’s Italian) or virtually
(class defines language as well, after all), and that one speaks most freely when, like poor Guido da
Montefeltro, he feels that he is in the presence of a kindred spirit, another damned soul like himself.
The title and the epigraph to “Prufrock” both have prepared the reader for anticipating a struggle with
meaning that will require rethinking interpretive processes of suspicion as well as discovery, because they
have also prepared the reader to keep an open mind. In that sense, the opening verses, with their invitation to
accompany the speaker on some not yet defined act of discovery, seem quite appropriate, and therefore it is
not unusual for commentators to imagine that the “you” who is being addressed is the reader, which would
be all well and good except that the poem is a dramatic monologue.
The Dramatic Monologue

Eliot carefully constructs the poem to keep all of its elements working at arm’s length both from him, the
poet, and from its readers by using for the poem’s ostensible form the dramatic monologue. As a literary
genre, the dramatic monologue had already been put to great and effective use by the English poet Robert
Browning within decades of the time that Eliot was writing. Eliot’s is only “ostensibly” a dramatic
monologue, however, because Eliot takes liberties and plays games even with the relatively uncomplicated
rules governing the structure of the dramatic monologue. Such a poem should have a speaker who is clearly
identified as someone other than the poet; here, the Eliot poem fulfills the requirement (as the use of the
first-person pronoun “I” implies, unless J. Alfred Prufrock is to be regarded as an alias for Eliot, which is an
absurd proposition). The second most critical requirement— that there is an audience within the poem who
is also clearly identified—is paid an ironic lip service by Eliot.
With Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” an example of a well-constructed dramatic monologue, a single
reading will readily reveal that the speaker is the duke of Ferrara and that the audience is an otherwise
unidentified emissary from a count who is apparently trying to arrange a marriage between his daughter and
the duke. With “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” however, Eliot only appears to honor this second
requirement of the dramatic monologue as well, inasmuch as, in the first stanza, he has his speaker,
Prufrock, invite an anonymous “you” to accompany him on a speculative visit involving an “overwhelming
question of insidious intent”—but that seems to be the end of it.
As already noted, some take the “you” being addressed to be the reader. In keeping with the requirements of
the dramatic monologue, however, the “you” is supposed to be someone to whom Prufrock is actually
speaking in a dramatic context, so how can “you” be the reader, one might well ask. Other critical
speculation has gone as far as to suggest that that personage is none other than Jean Verdenal, the young
Frenchman to whom the volume (but not the poem) was subsequently dedicated and who had died in combat
during World War I at Gallipoli. Others yet have speculated that the “you” is Prufrock’s alter ego, the person
he would like to be but feels incapable of ever becoming. The only valid conclusion seems to be the
conclusion that the text itself inspires, and that is that the “you” can be anyone and therefore is very likely no
one—certainly no one in particular. Unlike in the example taken from Browning’s poem, in which all the
duke’s remarks are addressed to and, so, governed by his relationship with the count’s emissary, turning
readers of the poem into eavesdroppers, a further problem is that this “you” introduced early in “Prufrock”
virtually disappears as an effective presence from the scene, or at least from Prufrock’s ken of reference, so
that ultimately he or she barely even exists any longer as any sort of controlling factor in the direction that
Prufrock’s musings take.
There is one final requirement for the dramatic monologue. In keeping with the idea of its being dramatic
poetry, the dramatic monologue is supposed to sound like speech in the act of being uttered. Anyone who
has ever had to deal with the abrupt shifts and unexpected turns in Prufrock’s monologue knows that, for all
the beauty of the language as it rolls off the tongue, while it may be a model of speech’s natural rhythms, it
is not in any way a consecutively coherent commentary. Indeed, it goes out of its way to insist that it is no
use to regard it in terms of the logic of a natural language that we have ever heard or encountered before.
Those are the more rudimentary elements of the dramatic monologue. When it comes to the real issue of
presenting a speaker whose predicament both engages the reader’s attention and keeps the reader’s interest,
however, Eliot again breaks all the rules, such as they are. Instead of an engaging characterization, Prufrock
comes through as an unsympathetic character whose main claim to fame, and to his making demands on our
attention and interest, is that he is seeking sympathy or lamenting his ability to obtain it. There we have the
doubling effect again. One half of the equation—Prufrock is unlikable—cancels the other—Prufrock wants
to be liked—leaving readers with the withering sense of a universal naught that seems to have Prufrock in its
vague and paradoxically vacant grip.
The Text
The charm of a poem like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is found in its radically altering the
traditional focus of poetic composition away from theme, what the poet “means,” and toward gesture, what
the speaker is meaning to say, and why. In the truest sense of the word charm, by which is meant the
fascination that the poetry continues to hold over readers, from the novice to the most expert and
sophisticated, “Prufrock” is charming. But Prufrock himself is not. That that speaker is imaginary makes for
a reading experience that is as rich and strange as Prufrock is, as a personage, boring and bland. Indeed, a
large part of Eliot’s achievement in the poem is that he makes his readers not only listen to but struggle to
understand a man who is telling them that he is so insignificant in his own social circles as to be hardly
noticeable, and it is in this very tension, the gap between what the reader is being told and who is telling it so
that the language of the poem seems both to separate from and to create reality, that “Prufrock” both finds
and defines its distinctively modernist qualities. So, then, the critical principle that has been established thus
far, and by which a reading of the poem will now proceed, can be stated as follows: To understand “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the reader must understand the speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock—not what he
is saying so much as why he is saying it—and from that angle the poem can be most profitably approached.
Prufrock’s dilemma is not that he is trapped but that he thinks that he knows that he is trapped, and it is that
awful knowledge on his part, be it right or wrong, that then controls the confused thoughts and feelings that
emerge through his monologue. This dilemma is what philosophers called an epistemological one—an
intellectual problem, in which there are conflicts in dealing both what is known and how it has come to be
known. If readers cannot easily make sense out of what Prufrock is saying, it is because he cannot make
sense of it himself.
As has already been pointed out, Eliot magnifies this kind of a dilemma, for both Prufrock and the reader, by
casting the poem as a dramatic monologue. Someone besides Prufrock—that vague and mysterious “you”—
has been fixed in the reader’s mind as a key to the solution to Prufrock’s problem, yet the identity of “you”
is never clearly established, itself an ironic twist whose effects are impossible to calculate. And yet, too, that
“come hither” opening—“ Let us go, then, . . .”—allows the poem to sound rather like a traditional love
song, and maybe that is its purpose. There cannot be a love song, after all, without someone or something to
love. Aside from the fact that Prufrock’s particular brand of love song will quickly prove to be more a
lament for his incapacity or lack of opportunity to love, that opening pitch of his to go to where the evening
is spread out against the sky sounds appealing, even alluring enough—until it leads the reader right into the
surprise of the disjunctive image that then comes. The invitation does not set the scene of a pleasant summer
night but of a patient who has been etherized and is lying on a table, ready for surgery.
So many shocks to the reader’s sensibilities in such quick order cannot be easily overcome, and as any
reader of the poem knows, there is no getting back on track from that point on. The reader moves more and
more deeply into bewilderment and confusion as the first stanza continues with a sort of relentless onslaught
of data that promise much but deliver nothing, so that by its conclusion, any notions of whether this is a love
song or questions as to whom the speaker is addressing have been forsaken, not for lack of interest but
because they seem to be irrelevant.
Something of real significance has been accomplished nevertheless; the reader knows that he or she is not
here to be educated but to listen—as Dante must listen to Guido da Montefeltro. As the reader listens, he or
she will begin to hear what needs to be heard, and that, rather than the reader’s assumptions and suspicions,
is what will bring him or her, finally, to an understanding of who Prufrock is—or, rather who he thinks he is,
that being, ironically, a man to whom no one has ever listened and to whom no one has ever paid any real
attention. So, then, the women coming and going while they talk of the great Renaissance Italian artist
Michelangelo— or is he the handsome young immigrant gardener?—are women whose main fault is that
they are not talking about, let alone to, our hero, J. Alfred Prufrock. He does not tell his putative listener as
much, of course, for the simple fact that he is not aware of a listener.
Here Eliot utilizes the dramatic monologue to its best advantage, allowing for dramatic irony whereby Eliot
enables his readers to see things that Prufrock cannot see about himself but that he nevertheless reveals as he
continues his love song, which turns out to be, rather than a dramatic monologue, a monologue about
himself. In that manner, the reader can imagine that everything that Prufrock is saying, including his
observations of both the landscapes and the people around him, is true, but only from his point of view and
only inasmuch as it reveals his state of mind, a state of mind that revolves primarily, perhaps even
exclusively around himself.
The notorious yellow fog that encircles the house in stanza three suddenly makes perfect sense if the reader
sees it as an emblem of how trapped Prufrock is (a device that Eliot would later call an objective correlative).
The yellow fog is, no doubt, a typical urban blight of the times caused by the burning of coal with a high
sulfur content. But the yellow fog in its lurid haziness is also a detail that comes in startling juxtaposition to
the drawing room scenes that Prufrock has otherwise been evoking. Seen that way, the yellow fog calls to
mind again that doubleness, those outside in, inside out dislocations and combinations that drive the poem
forward. They both mimic and illustrate Prufrock’s own sense of being trapped within a body, within his
formal clothing, within the formal settings, and within the closed society in which he lives and which, like
the fog, envelops him.
What provides him his point of reference also reminds him of how limited his horizons are, so that the
evening sky can be figuratively interrupted by its resemblance to a recumbent and nearly lifeless body, and
the fog can, catlike, both circumscribe and constrain Prufrock’s connections to a world beyond his narrowly
defined social environment. The fog, then, represents the hopelessness of a limited vision, a vision limited
by fixed ways of thinking and feeling, so that the more he might squirm or might conspire to escape the
enclosed social space within which he feels himself trapped, “pinned and wriggling” under both imagined
and real evaluative gazes, the more he becomes exposed.
Eventually, Prufrock clearly becomes someone who thinks of himself only as he imagines others think of
him. Is he getting thin? Is his hair getting thin? Does his tie look all right? This corrosive self-consciousness
would be bearable, the reader/ listener is led to imagine, except that Prufrock wishes not so much to break
out as to connect with and affect this social order that circumscribes and dictates his behavior, embodied for
him in the behavior of women who seem to judge him but otherwise ignore him. He has noticed the hair on
their arms, a rather animal and somewhat sexual if not erotic detail, but he cannot imagine any one of them
deigning to speak to him even if he were to claim that he was Lazarus risen from the dead and capable of
telling them the most startling truths.
Lazarus is a figure from the Gospels, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead, and Prufrock also thinks of
himself in other biblical terms—as John the Baptist, whose head was brought in on a platter at the behest of
Salome after she danced the dance of the seven veils for Herod Antipas—as well as in literary terms, for
example, as the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s 17th-century love poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” The biblical
and literary allusions, besides giving the reader insights into the fact that Prufrock is widely read, suggest
further how paralyzed Prufrock’s imagination has become, for he uses the allusions only to further excoriate
and castigate himself. He is, by his own admission, not Hamlet, only some officious fool. Even were he
Lazarus, he imagines, one of the women would put him in his place, so he comes by starts and stops to try to
recognize and accept that place for what it is, to admit that he is not the star of the show, but a lesser
character, taking up space, willing to be used, to be ignored, and not to be missed.
The man who cannot decide whether to disturb the universe or eat a peach, who sees either action of equal
duration and importance, is not likely to stay fixed on any one thought or conclusion for very long, however.
The poetry’s constant vacillation between the ridiculous and the sublime, the high minded and high sounding
and the vulgar and the lowlife, a vacillation that the attentive reader experiences from the poem’s title
onward, follows through all the way to the end of the poem. Prufrock, inflating and deflating his ego and
expectations in virtually every other line, cannot finally arrive at any satisfactory conclusion without
betraying the very real qualities of social and emotional—and imaginative—paralysis that Eliot has created
with the poetry.
Toward the end of his monologue, whose dramatic quality is that it is not dramatic at all, Prufrock is left
imagining mermaids who do not like him, parting his hair behind, dressing more casually so that he can walk
along the seashore—anything but taking his own present circumstances in hand for what they are and
accepting them, particularly if they prove to be (as they apparently already have proved to be) incapable of
being changed. So too, the man who, little more than a voice, begins by disgorging all his pent-up
frustrations and confusions on everyone and no one, thereby disburdening himself of what amounts to
nothing more than petty complaints and frivolous dislikes, winds up being drowned by or in, of all things,
human voices.
CRITICAL COMMENTARY
It is easy to get so lost in the work as to lose sight of the worker, the maker, the poet who gives us the poem.
For its point must finally be Eliot’s, not Prufrock’s, since Prufrock’s point cannot be Eliot’s. What then is
Eliot’s point?
Prufrock knows, or appears to think that he knows, that he does not have the strength necessary to force the
moment to the sort of crisis that will free him, and he thinks that he knows why he does not have that
strength—that he is a lesser, not a greater man. Even that, however, is a sort of self-congratulatory self-
dramatization on Prufrock’s part, for his vision, like anyone’s, is limited by what he has seen and by what he
can see. In that sense, Eliot the poet has succeeded in making his characterization of Prufrock seem to be as
real as the rest of us, and that is an incredible achievement in and of itself. The poet, however, is not limited
by his vision, since he contains it and has created Prufrock for the sake of seeing what is real but must
otherwise remain invisible.
To divide the creation from its creator, Eliot would argue from early in his literary critical career, is a
necessary action if the reader is to benefit from the creation, and this rule is especially true in Eliot’s case in
general and in the case of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in particular. The temptation to identify the
poet with the poem is a powerful one. Eliot certainly understood that, and a poem on the order of Prufrock
begs the question. In many respects Eliot’s life, or at least his background, appears to be duplicated or at
least reflected in the poem, and these resemblances, casual though they may be, appear to extend well
beyond matters of social class and ethnic and regional associations. Eliot, too, was often described by friends
and acquaintances alike as diffident, stiff, and formal to a fault and more aware of proper manners and of
keeping one’s distance socially than could easily be regarded as typical even for someone of an
uppermiddle- class background. Just how much the poet’s personality, let alone personal detail, is reflected
in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is open to endless speculation, of course.
That it would be fair to regard Prufrock as Eliot’s alter ego would be risky critical business at best,
nevertheless. For just one outstanding discrepancy, Eliot was a very young man when he composed
“Prufrock,” while it seems obvious from those elements of self-description that emerge from Prufrock’s
monologue and from his tone of worldweariness that Prufrock is approaching if not in fact in his early
middle age.
Any poet writes out of what he knows, but that is the end of it. Readers tend to think of the creative mind as
one that is endlessly inventing; in common parlance, we speak of someone as having “a wild imagination,”
as if those two words form a necessary conjunction. Most of the time, however, the imagination functions
not to invent but to transmute what is already there in the experience of the artist into something that, as art,
becomes a part of universal experience, still recognized as coming from the artist’s general experience but
no more his or hers otherwise than it is mine or yours. Surely that was the case with Eliot, according to his
critical pronouncements from as early as the time of the 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” It
stands to reason that his character Prufrock would move among well-heeled individuals in the formal
settings of the drawing-room culture that flourished among the venerable old families of America at the end
of the 19th century, not because that was a special culture, although it may appear so to a typical reader of
today, but because that was the world that the young Eliot knew.
But to conclude, then, that there is some sort of autobiographical connection between Eliot and the speaker
of his poem would be to miss the point that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, after all, a poem,
intended not to record the poet’s life but to explore the poet’s observations. Those observations, if truly
regarded as the products of the poetic imagination, must inevitably involve not only people unique to
Prufrock’s—and Eliot’s— time and place and class, but all of us. Nor it is merely playing with words or
coining a coy phrase to talk of a poetic imagination. The oppositions and startling juxtapositions and
unsettling dislocations and disjunctions that the poetry of “Prufrock” creates throughout serve a purpose that
is neither journalistic (making the poem autobiography, for example) or psychological (making the poem a
case study) but rather aesthetic in nature. That is to say, they are intended not to inform or to persuade but to
engage the reader in the processes of creation and thereby force the reader to make sense not of the social or
personal or psychological but of the delicate balances among perception, experience, and language that form,
for the most part, what is generally called reality. That may seem to be an immense, almost impossible task
for the poet to take upon himself, let alone credit to a work of literature, but that is what Eliot the poet is out
to achieve and that is what certainly makes this particular poem one of the earliest masterworks of literary
modernism, as Ezra Pound so astutely observed it to be.
If Eliot is correct and poetry deals with permanent human impulses, “Prufrock’s” is a basic, perhaps even
essential human conflict between the desire to be noticed, which makes one dependent on what other people
think, and the desire to be self-defining and self-directed, which requires one not to care what people think.
Most manage to separate the requirements of maintaining group dynamics from the sense of one’s own self-
worth, but Prufrock appears to be incapable of resolving the conflict, and so his dilemma is created. That
does not make “Prufrock” the poem nothing more than a psychological study, however. Prufrock the person
is not even a characterization; rather, he is a verbal construct, a creature made up of words, as Hamlet once
said, and thus far less substantial than even a phantom of smoke and air.
Without diminishing the more or less full-bodied individual who nevertheless emerges from the words, their
tone and color and mood, it is not difficult to imagine that, rather than any truly living being, Prufrock
represents, embodies, the masculine principle, self-centered and vain, awash in a sea of feminine reserve that
is itself closeted and yet somehow inviting, certainly alluring. Whether Prufrock is a man obsessed by
women or by their apparent lack of interest in him, or he is a person dissatisfied with his station in life or
with the life that fate has dealt with, or he is an individual uncertain of his sexual identity or simply a lonely
person craving only a sympathetic ear, his importance as a literary creation rests on what his condition
reveals of the human condition. Prufrock is that not-untypical human creature at odds with both himself and
his social and physical environment who is struggling nevertheless to find an accommodating reality or even
just an accommodating point of view whereby he might be at peace with himself and at ease in the world.
The reader who can see in Prufrock, for all the apparent idiosyncrasies of class and the times that he might
display, not the hero, as he tells us he is not, but still the agon, suffering the social and moral ills of the
ordinary man, can find in him as well the uniquely modernist nature of Eliot’s particular creation, a poem
that focuses, for all the startling breaks with the past that his new kind of poetry might require and result in,
the typical life led by a typical person in the real world, where nature is only a reflection of inner turmoils
and the unspoken tells more than words ever can. Whatever else they may hope to find there, readers are
ultimately drawn to Eliot, to the poem, for what Prufrock’s plight may tell them of their own inner conflicts
and turmoils, and of their own incessant effort to find the words to express those truly shaping forces.
Primarily his is the desire to be accepted not for what but for who he is, but he appears weak and indecisive
because he knows that he is unable to reconcile that dilemma himself. Only others can, so he winds up
imagining that his only hope is to get away from everyone else. At the poem’s end, Prufrock may be
thinking of committing suicide by drowning himself, but it is the sound of the voices of other humans,
creatures like himself, that awakens him from his self-centered reverie. There are worse awakenings than his.
No one likes to be a specimen, his nerves displayed for all the world to see, and Prufrock knows that. But
Eliot, by having made his creation a specimen of what it is to be alive and to be human, exposes his readers
to the very sorts of lessons that only great art can teach—enduring lessons in the human heart. What,
however, distinguishes Eliot’s treatment of those tried and true lessons that have been grist for the literary
mill since time immemorial is that Eliot, taking a page from his mentor Laforgue, requires his readers to
engage their heads, their minds, rather than their own hearts in deciphering the depths of mixed hopes and
despair, frustration and encouragement, that, though only the heart can truly plumb them, nevertheless all too
often fall on deaf ears, exactly as Prufrock is certain that his complaints, his lament, may do. Thus, while
Prufrock the speaker may sound sentimental or seem to sentimentalize his condition from time to time,
“Prufrock” the poem, by sending such a variety of mixed verbal and social signals to readers as have been
enumerated here, neither sounds sentimental nor sentimentalizes Prufrock’s condition or his social milieu.
Although this desentimentalized approach may often strike the unprepared reader as sounding instead cold
or dispassionate, it is nevertheless in keeping with the modernism that Eliot, with poems such as “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” helped usher in as a literary movement that, ironically enough, saved overt
expressions of sentimentality as a literary mode by removing from them their patina of a romantic
excessiveness. It bears repeating that Eliot accomplishes that feat by deflecting his readers’ attention from
the poet to his speaker, putting all the sentiment, such as it is, into the mouth of a figure as unromantic and,
dare we say, insignificant as Prufrock, thereby depersonalizing those very sentiments. This methodology is
in keeping with the poetics that Eliot would shortly delineate in his essay “Tradition and the Individual
Talent,” and the curious reader would do well to consult the entry on that essay.
The novice reader, daunted by the apparent complexities of the poetry, would do well also to approach
“Prufrock” not as thematic poetry intended to state some specific meaning or to expose an otherwise abstract
truth, but as a character study whose carefully contrived and manipulated nuances reveal not simply the
nature of the speaker but the social coordinates of the world in which he resides. A person who has to
“prepare a face” for his encounters with others in his social environment and who ineffectually imagines
escaping from it is, after all, uncomfortable not just with all those other people but with being inside his own
skin, from which there is no escape. It is through this careful examination and exposure of a single human
being that Eliot introduces not some preconceived thematic considerations or universal truths to his readers
so much as the means humans devise to cope as social beings. Such means become a constant theme in Eliot,
albeit a necessarily unstated one
From the title itself to the ominously cryptic ending, in which an anonymous “we” drowns in sea of human
voices, the poetry of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” continues to challenge readers’ expectations
both of what constitutes poetry and what constitutes meaning. Does this “we,” for example, truly drown in a
sea of human voices, or does it drown in some other sort of sea because those voices have awakened it, and
if so, from what, and what, then, is that other sea? And why the editorial “we,” anyhow, when it is clear that
Prufrock has been speaking till that moment of and for himself? But has he been? The poem opens, after all,
with that invitation to “you and I,” a definite “we” again, no doubt, but not one that can be easily identified.
Rather, the further the poem proceeds, the more it seems as if Prufrock is speaking to no one but himself,
since one of the points that he continually stresses is that no one will listen to him in any case, no matter
what he says or does.
Those are just a few of the problems that the poem poses for readers to this day, and yet its enduring
reputation as a masterwork of 20th-century literature serves as a reminder that the work endures not because
of its critical reputation, which is considerable, or because of its difficulties, which are equally so, but
because of its great beauty as a work expressing what Eliot would later call a permanent human impulse. To
give that permanent human impulse a body, Eliot would argue, is the function of poetry. Prufrock is just
such a body.
BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS
How so young and comparatively isolated a poet came to write one of the most famous poems of the early
20th century, itself one of the most productive periods of literary accomplishments and advances in English
since the time of Shakespeare, remains something of a mystery. It is not atypical for a perfectly ordinary
combination of experiences and opportunities to have an extraordinary result. In the case of “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the primary shaping events seem to have been an unusually refined sensibility
matched with a high, and highly educated, intelligence and an extremely dry wit. Eliot would later argue that
one may never be certain what combination of perfectly everyday activities can nevertheless be altered, in
the creative mind, into art, or into what he termed art emotions.
Since Eliot wrote the poem after having spent some time in BOSTON, Massachusetts, and environs as a
student, first at Milton Academy and later at Harvard College, it is easy to associate the poem’s social
milieu, as redolent of a drawing-room society as it is, with that New England city, renowned to this day for
being a socially upright and closed community. (Although it may be that reference, in the opening stanza, to
oyster shells that brings a seaside town like Boston to mind.) We know, for example, that while Eliot was
not himself a proper Bostonian, having been born to an old New England family but in the comparative
wilds of ST. LOUIS, Missouri, the Eliots were a prominent, upper-middle-class family. So Eliot knew a
world of morning coats and of afternoon teas and polite conversation about the arts and all the other finer
things in life, including well-behaved if not even aloof young women.
Eliot’s would have been a world, in other words, where matters of manners and decorum took precedence
over more common human impulses, such as sexual desire, perhaps, not to mention something as simple as
the longing for the natural ease of human interaction without the constraints of social proprieties. The young
Eliot would himself have inhabited a world where the longing to let one’s hair, and guard, down in formal
social settings was very likely frowned on.
The reader must be careful, however, not to associate the poet’s own life too much with the material of the
poem. This is particularly true in Eliot’s case, for he spent much critical ink arguing for a separation between
the person and the poem. In the case of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” it is fair to assume that Eliot
is dealing with a relatively commonplace theme, and that is, again, the conflicts that are created when natural
human impulses for dialogue and community are frustrated by rigid social norms. Where Eliot’s treatment of
this thematic commonplace is lifted to a new level of poetic expression, thus making it a modernist
achievement, is found in his approaching such a serious, and potentially pretentious, theme from an angle so
aslant that the social criticism, real or implied, is obscured by the absurdity of Prufrock’s predicament, and
for that Eliot has his education in the literary traditions of continental Europe, rather than just those of
Britain and America, to thank.
The young Eliot knew that world of real Boston tea parties, to be sure, but, thanks to the traditions of a
liberal education in which he had been taught and to a mother who had an abiding interest in Italian
Renaissance culture, he also knew the world that had produced a literary classic such as Dante’s Divine
Comedy, from which the epigraph to “Prufrock” would be taken, as well as the world of the other foreign
ingredient in this tale of what both nurture and influence can produce in the way of a literary achievement.
That would be his near contemporaries, the French symbolist poets, in particular Jules Laforgue, for whom
language and learning were as likely to be intellectual toys as meaningful tools. If Eliot had come to know
his Dante largely through formal education, he came to know Laforgue and the French symbolist movement
in general from a 1908 encounter with a book by Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
“Prufrock” the work and Prufrock the personage represent the end of an era and an order, the period from the
Revolutionary War to the beginnings of World War I during which Americans, with few exceptions, and
those being the very rich and privileged, were by and large isolated from their literary and cultural roots in
Europe and glad of it. Eliot implicitly underscores this shift back to a more Eurocentric worldview on the
part of young, educated Americans by using a late medieval Italian poet, Dante, to create the atmosphere for
the poem’s tone and mood, and by then turning to contemporary French poets, and French thinking in
general, to find a more expansive range of poetic language and a fractured and thereby freed poetical
grammar in and by which to convey that tone and mood.
Indeed, though he had been experimenting with poetry writing throughout his undergraduate years, Eliot,
recently graduated from Harvard, was spending his first year abroad in Paris during the fall of 1910 and well
into 1911 when he wrote “Prufrock.” For any young, privileged American of his time and his class,
immersion not so much in Europe as in the so-called City of Light, with its Latinate, Roman Catholic roots
so alien to Eliot’s Anglo-American, Protestant background and upbringing, and with the French capital’s
equally suspect reputation among Americans as a libertine city of sexual and social license also alien to
Eliot’s Puritan moral bearings, was a rite of passage not to be ignored or dismissed. Nor should it be
forgotten that Paris was also a major cultural mecca for young Americans seeking to overcome the
somewhat unpolished rawness of the American experience with a good dose of the sort of sophistication and
learning that only the Old World could provide.
This was a particularly exciting time to be in Paris. The social and political ferment for which the French
have always been renowned had overflowed into the aesthetic and philosophical realms. On the latter front,
Eliot attended lectures at the Sorbonne, studying the work of the French philosopher Henr i Ber gson and the
conservative political and spiritual thinking of Charles Maurras. He also struck up a friendship with a young
Frenchman, Jules Verdenal, to whom he would subsequently dedicate his first volume of poetry, Prufrock
and Other Observations, the title of the volume serving readers notice that this would be a poetry not of
personal expression but of impression and reaction. The frenetic literary life of the French capital would also
provide the incentive, the catalyst for experimentation and change. We are encouraged to think of literary
modernism as a time in which literature, but particularly poetry, renewed itself. But despite the innovative
work of Eliot’s American precursors such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, poetry had first renewed
itself not in America or even Britain but in France during the latter half of the 19th century.
Eliot was already quite familiar with the work of French poets Arthur Rimbaud, CHARLES BAUDELAIRE,
and Jules Laforgue, thanks again in large part to Symons’s landmark study in English on these French
symbolist poets. Their new kind of poetry, for the French, focused on the city and on the plight of the
intellect, the will, and the spirit of modern city-dwellers, young, sophisticated, and well-educated but
nevertheless overwhelmed by impersonal public and social demands in conflict with personal confusions and
general chaos—individuals awash in a sea of contending private emotions and desires in a world of
bureaucrats and paradox. Uniquely and together, these French poets, far more than either their English or
American counterparts, had fashioned a poetic tool that, without sacrificing any poet’s first concerns, which
are for language and uncensored self-expression, could comment nevertheless on a culture gone awry.
Whatever else may have drawn the young Eliot to the composition of poetry in the first place, he found his
mentors in these poets, Laforgue primarily, who seemed, for all their foreignness otherwise, to share his eye
for finding the famished soul in the midst of life’s increasingly materialist feast.
Is it any wonder, then, that Eliot dishes up, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem that is like
nothing that had ever come before it in English? It is as if the freedom that he was experiencing in Paris
combined with the liberating spirit of the times, inasmuch as poetic expression was concerned, and the result
was a poem that expressed a yearning for freedom and liberation in the language and settings of all the
traditional social and cultural constraints to which Eliot, scion of an old, established, and prominent New
England family, had become accustomed.
In conceptualizing “Prufrock,” in other words, Eliot is able to play on his special knowledge as the insider to
use the techniques of an outside culture, the French, to criticize the inside culture.
A part of the great irony of the poem is that its speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock, is also an insider whose crisis is
created by the fact that he feels like an outsider within his own small if not in fact tight social circle, an
individual burdened with an immense social discomfort and riddled with both a fear of failure and a
reluctance to upset the apple cart of his own sense of alienation. This doubling effect, precarious though it
may be, is used to immense advantage by Eliot throughout the poem, which so perfectly matches topic and
technique, for example, that it seems more a poetic exercise than a poetic statement, putting the reader
continuously on guard but off his or her game, as it were.
SYNOPSIS
The Title and Epigraph
So pervasive are Eliot’s techniques and reputation by now that readers nowadays fail to realize how startling
it might have been to an English-language reader of the time to come across a serious poem by an American
poet with a title as silly-sounding as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and an epigraph in a foreign
language, its source unidentified, yet one that turns out to be from the pages of the first part of
Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno— that is, from the depths of hell itself. This literary classic would
hardly have been an unknown commodity in academic circles, but given its Italianate, papist leanings, it
would hardly have been thought of as mainstream, popular literature. For Eliot to cite it without any other
species of textual citation was therefore either a daring or a thoughtless act— unless the very act of leaving
his readers in the dark as to the epigraph’s source served the purposes of the direction and the purpose of the
original poetry to come.
To appreciate any Eliot poem, at least from the early periods of his career, readers need to understand Eliot’s
most transparent literary technique, and that is his ability to mix up the most serious with the most frivolous
elements without either warning or much indication as to which is which. For now, however, it is important
to observe in that particular mixing of the absurd (Prufrock’s name), with the ominous (an epigraph from a
poem about hall) that only someone who knew intimately the life and lifestyle that was about to be portrayed
in the poem could so thoroughly and simultaneously both echo and betray that world’s values.
This dilemma is established as early as the poem’s title and epigraph. Readers regarding the title of the poem
for the first time undoubtedly come up against a series of expectations that are no sooner set in motion than
dashed. Whatever the idea of a love song may be in the most general terms, no one is likely to be thrilled at
hearing that it is the love song of a man named J. Alfred Prufrock. Indeed, such a name reads more like
something found on a calling card than in the title of an composition as intimate as a love song. Lovers, after
all, do not refer to each other by their legal or formal names, unless it is out of some species of skewed
affection, nor is a man who goes by a moniker as presumptuous as J. Alfred, with its profound hints of
stuffed-shirtedness, likely to give the automatic impression that he should be either the subject or the
originator of a love song.
Whatever readers may make of all these troubling matters (even if it is only at that unconscious, subliminal
level where Eliot the critic will later say the poem does its real work on us), they have been thrown off guard
and invariably puzzled as to what sort of a love song they should be prepared to find as the poem begins. A
comic turn or parody? Pretentious nonsense?
Yet, before the poem begins, that strange—in the sense that it is literally foreign—epigraph intervenes. To
learn that it is a passage from Dante’s Inferno works against the apparent air of a frivolity that has been
established by the poem’s contradictory title. The epigraph also poses a puzzle until its source is identified
and its words are translated from Italian into English, and this should be taken as the poet’s (not the speaker,
a crucial distinction as far as the dramatic monologue is concerned) warning to the reader to be wary. All is
not as it seems.
Once translated, the epigraph may seem enlightening, but even that is only at first glance. Specifically, the
words are spoken to Dante, who has made himself the protagonist of his own poem, by a man named Guido
da Montefeltro, who is being punished in the Eighth Circle of the Inferno, or pretty deep down in hell, for
having given false counsel. These sinners are among the fraudulent in Dante’s scheme of things infernal, and
for having abused the gift of human speech to deceive and, so, abused the good faith of others, these
particular sinners, Guido among them, are imprisoned forever in tongues of fire, emblematic of speech,
which is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Encountering and recognizing him, Dante wants to hear Guido’s story of
how he came to be here among those damned eternally to hell, whereupon Guido, cautious about
besmirching whatever good name he might still have among the living, tells Dante, “If I were to believe that
I was speaking to anyone who would ever return to the world, this flame would cease to stir any further, but
since no one ever returned alive from these depths, if what I hear is true, then without fear of infamy I
respond to you.”
Before jumping to conclusions, the reader should be warned that this is a highly textured passage in its
original context alone. A quick take on the epigraph, once it has been deciphered, could lead the unwary
reader to conclude that the poetry to come that the epigraph is ostensibly introducing should be read in the
context of someone who imagines himself to be in hell, or at least a hellish situation. Such a conclusion,
while it may have possibilities, would be hasty nevertheless. For one thing, the passage for Dante’s purposes
alone is full of dramatic ironies—the speaker, Guido da Montefeltro, is a liar, after all, surrounded in hell by
other liars, not to mention the fact that hell’s master, Satan, is called the father of lies. Yet with incredulity,
Guido imagines that what he has heard is “true.” Who is he kidding—himself or Dante? For another thing,
Guido has figured wrong in Dante’s case. Ironically, the person to whom Guido then proceeds, without fear
of infamy, to tell the tale of his treachery turns out, in the fiction Dante has created, to be not only someone
who will return to the world of the living but who is also a poet who will then write, in the Divine
Comedy, an account of all that he has seen and heard, including, of course, this confession of Guido’s that
has been given in the strictest confidence.
Once put into such a complex context of the compounded ironies of the deceiver deceived, the Eliot epigraph
from Dante obscures rather than clarifies the coming poetry’s tone or meaning, unless, that is, the reader puts
the significance of the epigraph into the broadest possible context. In that zone of reference, the reader is
encouraged to recognize two primary principles of human communication: that to be able to understand
someone, one must know the language that the other is speaking, either literally (Dante’s Italian) or virtually
(class defines language as well, after all), and that one speaks most freely when, like poor Guido da
Montefeltro, he feels that he is in the presence of a kindred spirit, another damned soul like himself.
The title and the epigraph to “Prufrock” both have prepared the reader for anticipating a struggle with
meaning that will require rethinking interpretive processes of suspicion as well as discovery, because they
have also prepared the reader to keep an open mind. In that sense, the opening verses, with their invitation to
accompany the speaker on some not yet defined act of discovery, seem quite appropriate, and therefore it is
not unusual for commentators to imagine that the “you” who is being addressed is the reader, which would
be all well and good except that the poem is a dramatic monologue.
The Dramatic Monologue

Eliot carefully constructs the poem to keep all of its elements working at arm’s length both from him, the
poet, and from its readers by using for the poem’s ostensible form the dramatic monologue. As a literary
genre, the dramatic monologue had already been put to great and effective use by the English poet Robert
Browning within decades of the time that Eliot was writing. Eliot’s is only “ostensibly” a dramatic
monologue, however, because Eliot takes liberties and plays games even with the relatively uncomplicated
rules governing the structure of the dramatic monologue. Such a poem should have a speaker who is clearly
identified as someone other than the poet; here, the Eliot poem fulfills the requirement (as the use of the
first-person pronoun “I” implies, unless J. Alfred Prufrock is to be regarded as an alias for Eliot, which is an
absurd proposition). The second most critical requirement— that there is an audience within the poem who
is also clearly identified—is paid an ironic lip service by Eliot.
With Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” an example of a well-constructed dramatic monologue, a single
reading will readily reveal that the speaker is the duke of Ferrara and that the audience is an otherwise
unidentified emissary from a count who is apparently trying to arrange a marriage between his daughter and
the duke. With “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” however, Eliot only appears to honor this second
requirement of the dramatic monologue as well, inasmuch as, in the first stanza, he has his speaker,
Prufrock, invite an anonymous “you” to accompany him on a speculative visit involving an “overwhelming
question of insidious intent”—but that seems to be the end of it.
As already noted, some take the “you” being addressed to be the reader. In keeping with the requirements of
the dramatic monologue, however, the “you” is supposed to be someone to whom Prufrock is actually
speaking in a dramatic context, so how can “you” be the reader, one might well ask. Other critical
speculation has gone as far as to suggest that that personage is none other than Jean Verdenal, the young
Frenchman to whom the volume (but not the poem) was subsequently dedicated and who had died in combat
during World War I at Gallipoli. Others yet have speculated that the “you” is Prufrock’s alter ego, the person
he would like to be but feels incapable of ever becoming. The only valid conclusion seems to be the
conclusion that the text itself inspires, and that is that the “you” can be anyone and therefore is very likely no
one—certainly no one in particular. Unlike in the example taken from Browning’s poem, in which all the
duke’s remarks are addressed to and, so, governed by his relationship with the count’s emissary, turning
readers of the poem into eavesdroppers, a further problem is that this “you” introduced early in “Prufrock”
virtually disappears as an effective presence from the scene, or at least from Prufrock’s ken of reference, so
that ultimately he or she barely even exists any longer as any sort of controlling factor in the direction that
Prufrock’s musings take.
There is one final requirement for the dramatic monologue. In keeping with the idea of its being dramatic
poetry, the dramatic monologue is supposed to sound like speech in the act of being uttered. Anyone who
has ever had to deal with the abrupt shifts and unexpected turns in Prufrock’s monologue knows that, for all
the beauty of the language as it rolls off the tongue, while it may be a model of speech’s natural rhythms, it
is not in any way a consecutively coherent commentary. Indeed, it goes out of its way to insist that it is no
use to regard it in terms of the logic of a natural language that we have ever heard or encountered before.
Those are the more rudimentary elements of the dramatic monologue. When it comes to the real issue of
presenting a speaker whose predicament both engages the reader’s attention and keeps the reader’s interest,
however, Eliot again breaks all the rules, such as they are. Instead of an engaging characterization, Prufrock
comes through as an unsympathetic character whose main claim to fame, and to his making demands on our
attention and interest, is that he is seeking sympathy or lamenting his ability to obtain it. There we have the
doubling effect again. One half of the equation—Prufrock is unlikable—cancels the other—Prufrock wants
to be liked—leaving readers with the withering sense of a universal naught that seems to have Prufrock in its
vague and paradoxically vacant grip.
The Text
The charm of a poem like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is found in its radically altering the
traditional focus of poetic composition away from theme, what the poet “means,” and toward gesture, what
the speaker is meaning to say, and why. In the truest sense of the word charm, by which is meant the
fascination that the poetry continues to hold over readers, from the novice to the most expert and
sophisticated, “Prufrock” is charming. But Prufrock himself is not. That that speaker is imaginary makes for
a reading experience that is as rich and strange as Prufrock is, as a personage, boring and bland. Indeed, a
large part of Eliot’s achievement in the poem is that he makes his readers not only listen to but struggle to
understand a man who is telling them that he is so insignificant in his own social circles as to be hardly
noticeable, and it is in this very tension, the gap between what the reader is being told and who is telling it so
that the language of the poem seems both to separate from and to create reality, that “Prufrock” both finds
and defines its distinctively modernist qualities. So, then, the critical principle that has been established thus
far, and by which a reading of the poem will now proceed, can be stated as follows: To understand “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the reader must understand the speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock—not what he
is saying so much as why he is saying it—and from that angle the poem can be most profitably approached.
Prufrock’s dilemma is not that he is trapped but that he thinks that he knows that he is trapped, and it is that
awful knowledge on his part, be it right or wrong, that then controls the confused thoughts and feelings that
emerge through his monologue. This dilemma is what philosophers called an epistemological one—an
intellectual problem, in which there are conflicts in dealing both what is known and how it has come to be
known. If readers cannot easily make sense out of what Prufrock is saying, it is because he cannot make
sense of it himself.
As has already been pointed out, Eliot magnifies this kind of a dilemma, for both Prufrock and the reader, by
casting the poem as a dramatic monologue. Someone besides Prufrock—that vague and mysterious “you”—
has been fixed in the reader’s mind as a key to the solution to Prufrock’s problem, yet the identity of “you”
is never clearly established, itself an ironic twist whose effects are impossible to calculate. And yet, too, that
“come hither” opening—“ Let us go, then, . . .”—allows the poem to sound rather like a traditional love
song, and maybe that is its purpose. There cannot be a love song, after all, without someone or something to
love. Aside from the fact that Prufrock’s particular brand of love song will quickly prove to be more a
lament for his incapacity or lack of opportunity to love, that opening pitch of his to go to where the evening
is spread out against the sky sounds appealing, even alluring enough—until it leads the reader right into the
surprise of the disjunctive image that then comes. The invitation does not set the scene of a pleasant summer
night but of a patient who has been etherized and is lying on a table, ready for surgery.
So many shocks to the reader’s sensibilities in such quick order cannot be easily overcome, and as any
reader of the poem knows, there is no getting back on track from that point on. The reader moves more and
more deeply into bewilderment and confusion as the first stanza continues with a sort of relentless onslaught
of data that promise much but deliver nothing, so that by its conclusion, any notions of whether this is a love
song or questions as to whom the speaker is addressing have been forsaken, not for lack of interest but
because they seem to be irrelevant.
Something of real significance has been accomplished nevertheless; the reader knows that he or she is not
here to be educated but to listen—as Dante must listen to Guido da Montefeltro. As the reader listens, he or
she will begin to hear what needs to be heard, and that, rather than the reader’s assumptions and suspicions,
is what will bring him or her, finally, to an understanding of who Prufrock is—or, rather who he thinks he is,
that being, ironically, a man to whom no one has ever listened and to whom no one has ever paid any real
attention. So, then, the women coming and going while they talk of the great Renaissance Italian artist
Michelangelo— or is he the handsome young immigrant gardener?—are women whose main fault is that
they are not talking about, let alone to, our hero, J. Alfred Prufrock. He does not tell his putative listener as
much, of course, for the simple fact that he is not aware of a listener.
Here Eliot utilizes the dramatic monologue to its best advantage, allowing for dramatic irony whereby Eliot
enables his readers to see things that Prufrock cannot see about himself but that he nevertheless reveals as he
continues his love song, which turns out to be, rather than a dramatic monologue, a monologue about
himself. In that manner, the reader can imagine that everything that Prufrock is saying, including his
observations of both the landscapes and the people around him, is true, but only from his point of view and
only inasmuch as it reveals his state of mind, a state of mind that revolves primarily, perhaps even
exclusively around himself.
The notorious yellow fog that encircles the house in stanza three suddenly makes perfect sense if the reader
sees it as an emblem of how trapped Prufrock is (a device that Eliot would later call an objective correlative).
The yellow fog is, no doubt, a typical urban blight of the times caused by the burning of coal with a high
sulfur content. But the yellow fog in its lurid haziness is also a detail that comes in startling juxtaposition to
the drawing room scenes that Prufrock has otherwise been evoking. Seen that way, the yellow fog calls to
mind again that doubleness, those outside in, inside out dislocations and combinations that drive the poem
forward. They both mimic and illustrate Prufrock’s own sense of being trapped within a body, within his
formal clothing, within the formal settings, and within the closed society in which he lives and which, like
the fog, envelops him.
What provides him his point of reference also reminds him of how limited his horizons are, so that the
evening sky can be figuratively interrupted by its resemblance to a recumbent and nearly lifeless body, and
the fog can, catlike, both circumscribe and constrain Prufrock’s connections to a world beyond his narrowly
defined social environment. The fog, then, represents the hopelessness of a limited vision, a vision limited
by fixed ways of thinking and feeling, so that the more he might squirm or might conspire to escape the
enclosed social space within which he feels himself trapped, “pinned and wriggling” under both imagined
and real evaluative gazes, the more he becomes exposed.
Eventually, Prufrock clearly becomes someone who thinks of himself only as he imagines others think of
him. Is he getting thin? Is his hair getting thin? Does his tie look all right? This corrosive self-consciousness
would be bearable, the reader/ listener is led to imagine, except that Prufrock wishes not so much to break
out as to connect with and affect this social order that circumscribes and dictates his behavior, embodied for
him in the behavior of women who seem to judge him but otherwise ignore him. He has noticed the hair on
their arms, a rather animal and somewhat sexual if not erotic detail, but he cannot imagine any one of them
deigning to speak to him even if he were to claim that he was Lazarus risen from the dead and capable of
telling them the most startling truths.
Lazarus is a figure from the Gospels, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead, and Prufrock also thinks of
himself in other biblical terms—as John the Baptist, whose head was brought in on a platter at the behest of
Salome after she danced the dance of the seven veils for Herod Antipas—as well as in literary terms, for
example, as the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s 17th-century love poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” The biblical
and literary allusions, besides giving the reader insights into the fact that Prufrock is widely read, suggest
further how paralyzed Prufrock’s imagination has become, for he uses the allusions only to further excoriate
and castigate himself. He is, by his own admission, not Hamlet, only some officious fool. Even were he
Lazarus, he imagines, one of the women would put him in his place, so he comes by starts and stops to try to
recognize and accept that place for what it is, to admit that he is not the star of the show, but a lesser
character, taking up space, willing to be used, to be ignored, and not to be missed.
The man who cannot decide whether to disturb the universe or eat a peach, who sees either action of equal
duration and importance, is not likely to stay fixed on any one thought or conclusion for very long, however.
The poetry’s constant vacillation between the ridiculous and the sublime, the high minded and high sounding
and the vulgar and the lowlife, a vacillation that the attentive reader experiences from the poem’s title
onward, follows through all the way to the end of the poem. Prufrock, inflating and deflating his ego and
expectations in virtually every other line, cannot finally arrive at any satisfactory conclusion without
betraying the very real qualities of social and emotional—and imaginative—paralysis that Eliot has created
with the poetry.
Toward the end of his monologue, whose dramatic quality is that it is not dramatic at all, Prufrock is left
imagining mermaids who do not like him, parting his hair behind, dressing more casually so that he can walk
along the seashore—anything but taking his own present circumstances in hand for what they are and
accepting them, particularly if they prove to be (as they apparently already have proved to be) incapable of
being changed. So too, the man who, little more than a voice, begins by disgorging all his pent-up
frustrations and confusions on everyone and no one, thereby disburdening himself of what amounts to
nothing more than petty complaints and frivolous dislikes, winds up being drowned by or in, of all things,
human voices.
CRITICAL COMMENTARY
It is easy to get so lost in the work as to lose sight of the worker, the maker, the poet who gives us the poem.
For its point must finally be Eliot’s, not Prufrock’s, since Prufrock’s point cannot be Eliot’s. What then is
Eliot’s point?
Prufrock knows, or appears to think that he knows, that he does not have the strength necessary to force the
moment to the sort of crisis that will free him, and he thinks that he knows why he does not have that
strength—that he is a lesser, not a greater man. Even that, however, is a sort of self-congratulatory self-
dramatization on Prufrock’s part, for his vision, like anyone’s, is limited by what he has seen and by what he
can see. In that sense, Eliot the poet has succeeded in making his characterization of Prufrock seem to be as
real as the rest of us, and that is an incredible achievement in and of itself. The poet, however, is not limited
by his vision, since he contains it and has created Prufrock for the sake of seeing what is real but must
otherwise remain invisible.
To divide the creation from its creator, Eliot would argue from early in his literary critical career, is a
necessary action if the reader is to benefit from the creation, and this rule is especially true in Eliot’s case in
general and in the case of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in particular. The temptation to identify the
poet with the poem is a powerful one. Eliot certainly understood that, and a poem on the order of Prufrock
begs the question. In many respects Eliot’s life, or at least his background, appears to be duplicated or at
least reflected in the poem, and these resemblances, casual though they may be, appear to extend well
beyond matters of social class and ethnic and regional associations. Eliot, too, was often described by friends
and acquaintances alike as diffident, stiff, and formal to a fault and more aware of proper manners and of
keeping one’s distance socially than could easily be regarded as typical even for someone of an
uppermiddle- class background. Just how much the poet’s personality, let alone personal detail, is reflected
in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is open to endless speculation, of course.
That it would be fair to regard Prufrock as Eliot’s alter ego would be risky critical business at best,
nevertheless. For just one outstanding discrepancy, Eliot was a very young man when he composed
“Prufrock,” while it seems obvious from those elements of self-description that emerge from Prufrock’s
monologue and from his tone of worldweariness that Prufrock is approaching if not in fact in his early
middle age.
Any poet writes out of what he knows, but that is the end of it. Readers tend to think of the creative mind as
one that is endlessly inventing; in common parlance, we speak of someone as having “a wild imagination,”
as if those two words form a necessary conjunction. Most of the time, however, the imagination functions
not to invent but to transmute what is already there in the experience of the artist into something that, as art,
becomes a part of universal experience, still recognized as coming from the artist’s general experience but
no more his or hers otherwise than it is mine or yours. Surely that was the case with Eliot, according to his
critical pronouncements from as early as the time of the 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” It
stands to reason that his character Prufrock would move among well-heeled individuals in the formal
settings of the drawing-room culture that flourished among the venerable old families of America at the end
of the 19th century, not because that was a special culture, although it may appear so to a typical reader of
today, but because that was the world that the young Eliot knew.
But to conclude, then, that there is some sort of autobiographical connection between Eliot and the speaker
of his poem would be to miss the point that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, after all, a poem,
intended not to record the poet’s life but to explore the poet’s observations. Those observations, if truly
regarded as the products of the poetic imagination, must inevitably involve not only people unique to
Prufrock’s—and Eliot’s— time and place and class, but all of us. Nor it is merely playing with words or
coining a coy phrase to talk of a poetic imagination. The oppositions and startling juxtapositions and
unsettling dislocations and disjunctions that the poetry of “Prufrock” creates throughout serve a purpose that
is neither journalistic (making the poem autobiography, for example) or psychological (making the poem a
case study) but rather aesthetic in nature. That is to say, they are intended not to inform or to persuade but to
engage the reader in the processes of creation and thereby force the reader to make sense not of the social or
personal or psychological but of the delicate balances among perception, experience, and language that form,
for the most part, what is generally called reality. That may seem to be an immense, almost impossible task
for the poet to take upon himself, let alone credit to a work of literature, but that is what Eliot the poet is out
to achieve and that is what certainly makes this particular poem one of the earliest masterworks of literary
modernism, as Ezra Pound so astutely observed it to be.
If Eliot is correct and poetry deals with permanent human impulses, “Prufrock’s” is a basic, perhaps even
essential human conflict between the desire to be noticed, which makes one dependent on what other people
think, and the desire to be self-defining and self-directed, which requires one not to care what people think.
Most manage to separate the requirements of maintaining group dynamics from the sense of one’s own self-
worth, but Prufrock appears to be incapable of resolving the conflict, and so his dilemma is created. That
does not make “Prufrock” the poem nothing more than a psychological study, however. Prufrock the person
is not even a characterization; rather, he is a verbal construct, a creature made up of words, as Hamlet once
said, and thus far less substantial than even a phantom of smoke and air.
Without diminishing the more or less full-bodied individual who nevertheless emerges from the words, their
tone and color and mood, it is not difficult to imagine that, rather than any truly living being, Prufrock
represents, embodies, the masculine principle, self-centered and vain, awash in a sea of feminine reserve that
is itself closeted and yet somehow inviting, certainly alluring. Whether Prufrock is a man obsessed by
women or by their apparent lack of interest in him, or he is a person dissatisfied with his station in life or
with the life that fate has dealt with, or he is an individual uncertain of his sexual identity or simply a lonely
person craving only a sympathetic ear, his importance as a literary creation rests on what his condition
reveals of the human condition. Prufrock is that not-untypical human creature at odds with both himself and
his social and physical environment who is struggling nevertheless to find an accommodating reality or even
just an accommodating point of view whereby he might be at peace with himself and at ease in the world.
The reader who can see in Prufrock, for all the apparent idiosyncrasies of class and the times that he might
display, not the hero, as he tells us he is not, but still the agon, suffering the social and moral ills of the
ordinary man, can find in him as well the uniquely modernist nature of Eliot’s particular creation, a poem
that focuses, for all the startling breaks with the past that his new kind of poetry might require and result in,
the typical life led by a typical person in the real world, where nature is only a reflection of inner turmoils
and the unspoken tells more than words ever can. Whatever else they may hope to find there, readers are
ultimately drawn to Eliot, to the poem, for what Prufrock’s plight may tell them of their own inner conflicts
and turmoils, and of their own incessant effort to find the words to express those truly shaping forces.
Primarily his is the desire to be accepted not for what but for who he is, but he appears weak and indecisive
because he knows that he is unable to reconcile that dilemma himself. Only others can, so he winds up
imagining that his only hope is to get away from everyone else. At the poem’s end, Prufrock may be
thinking of committing suicide by drowning himself, but it is the sound of the voices of other humans,
creatures like himself, that awakens him from his self-centered reverie. There are worse awakenings than his.
No one likes to be a specimen, his nerves displayed for all the world to see, and Prufrock knows that. But
Eliot, by having made his creation a specimen of what it is to be alive and to be human, exposes his readers
to the very sorts of lessons that only great art can teach—enduring lessons in the human heart. What,
however, distinguishes Eliot’s treatment of those tried and true lessons that have been grist for the literary
mill since time immemorial is that Eliot, taking a page from his mentor Laforgue, requires his readers to
engage their heads, their minds, rather than their own hearts in deciphering the depths of mixed hopes and
despair, frustration and encouragement, that, though only the heart can truly plumb them, nevertheless all too
often fall on deaf ears, exactly as Prufrock is certain that his complaints, his lament, may do. Thus, while
Prufrock the speaker may sound sentimental or seem to sentimentalize his condition from time to time,
“Prufrock” the poem, by sending such a variety of mixed verbal and social signals to readers as have been
enumerated here, neither sounds sentimental nor sentimentalizes Prufrock’s condition or his social milieu.
Although this desentimentalized approach may often strike the unprepared reader as sounding instead cold
or dispassionate, it is nevertheless in keeping with the modernism that Eliot, with poems such as “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” helped usher in as a literary movement that, ironically enough, saved overt
expressions of sentimentality as a literary mode by removing from them their patina of a romantic
excessiveness. It bears repeating that Eliot accomplishes that feat by deflecting his readers’ attention from
the poet to his speaker, putting all the sentiment, such as it is, into the mouth of a figure as unromantic and,
dare we say, insignificant as Prufrock, thereby depersonalizing those very sentiments. This methodology is
in keeping with the poetics that Eliot would shortly delineate in his essay “Tradition and the Individual
Talent,” and the curious reader would do well to consult the entry on that essay.
The novice reader, daunted by the apparent complexities of the poetry, would do well also to approach
“Prufrock” not as thematic poetry intended to state some specific meaning or to expose an otherwise abstract
truth, but as a character study whose carefully contrived and manipulated nuances reveal not simply the
nature of the speaker but the social coordinates of the world in which he resides. A person who has to
“prepare a face” for his encounters with others in his social environment and who ineffectually imagines
escaping from it is, after all, uncomfortable not just with all those other people but with being inside his own
skin, from which there is no escape. It is through this careful examination and exposure of a single human
being that Eliot introduces not some preconceived thematic considerations or universal truths to his readers
so much as the means humans devise to cope as social beings. Such means become a constant theme in Eliot,
albeit a necessarily unstated one

Analysis of Prufrock

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Analysis of Prufrock

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In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document, monograph or section or chapter

Epigraph and dedication page, The Waste

Epigraph and dedication page, The Waste

Epigraph and dedication page, The Waste

Ellipsis and Aposiopesis in “The Love Song of J.

On October 4, 1923, T. S. Eliot wrote to John Collier, a prospective

I grow old ... I grow old ...

2. The Gap Between Sex and Metaphysics

This is perhaps the most poignant of Prufrock's images, since radical

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

The Footman's snicker immediately precedes and obviously parallels

Would it have been worth while,

3. Men, Women ... and Prufrock

Let us roll all our Strength, and all

The carpe diem philosophy of Marvell's speaker is at odds with Prufrock's

Oh, do not ask “What is it?”

We never learn whether Prufrock is speaking to another person or to

I have heard the key

In the room the women come and go

We assume that their conversation is silly and trivial, although Prufrock

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

On October 4, 1923, T. S. Eliot wrote to John Collier, a prospective

I grow old ... I grow old ...

2. The Gap Between Sex and Metaphysics

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow

This is perhaps the most poignant of Prufrock's images, since radical

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

The Footman's snicker immediately precedes and obviously parallels

Would it have been worth while,

3. Men, Women ... and Prufrock

Let us roll all our Strength, and all

The carpe diem philosophy of Marvell's speaker is at odds with Prufrock's

Oh, do not ask “What is it?”

We never learn whether Prufrock is speaking to another person or to

I have heard the key

In the room the women come and go

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

Ellipsis and Aposiopesis in “The Love Song of J.

On October 4, 1923, T. S. Eliot wrote to John Collier, a prospective

I grow old ... I grow old ...

2. The Gap Between Sex and Metaphysics

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow

This is perhaps the most poignant of Prufrock's images, since radical

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

The Footman's snicker immediately precedes and obviously parallels

Would it have been worth while,

3. Men, Women ... and Prufrock

Let us roll all our Strength, and all

The carpe diem philosophy of Marvell's speaker is at odds with Prufrock's

Oh, do not ask “What is it?”

We never learn whether Prufrock is speaking to another person or to

I have heard the key

We assume that their conversation is silly and trivial, although Prufrock

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

Ellipsis and Aposiopesis in “The Love Song of J.

On October 4, 1923, T. S. Eliot wrote to John Collier, a prospective

I grow old ... I grow old ...

2. The Gap Between Sex and Metaphysics

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow

This is perhaps the most poignant of Prufrock's images, since radical

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Would it have been worth while,

3. Men, Women ... and Prufrock

Let us roll all our Strength, and all