.. I grow old...' are the evidence of the impending fear of death. One unusual part of the poem is how Eliot, or Prufrock, puts himself into a role in one of Shakespeare's plays and then admits that he is no Hamlet by saying 'No! I am not the Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.' Although I am guessing, I feel that Eliot was trying to say that Shakespeare's world and Eliot's twentieth century world were not so different and the modern world may even be simply a continuation of Shakespeare's. This entails that he could become another Hamlet.
Modernism can be defined as the twentieth century's new artistic or literary style made popular by poets such as T.S. Eliot and other artists, poets and writers of the time. The period was full of turmoil as there was the World War in Europe and in the United States there were the early stages of the industrial revolution. This lead to both internal and external commercial control struggles as well as many political expansion attempts. "The period of general neglect of Eliot's poetry was one in which a revolution was occurring in the theory of interpretation. Existentialist, phenomenologist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and poststructuralist theories appeared and stimulated dazzling conversations about how texts mean." (Bentley & Brooker, 1990, p. 5)
Modernism emerged in approximately 1914 as a revolt to the 19th century style of literary form. Modernism was...
Similar to the Itlian Renaissance movement's goal of being an intellectually based artistic revival inspired by a study of existing Classical literature and art, modernism was the twentieth century's rival. The movement seemed as though it was based on newer and more traditional forms of social organization. This poem symbolized the Modernism movement because Eliot touched upon the traditional forms of art, literature, social organization.
In conclusion, this report was about the poem called 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' by Thomas Sterns Eliot better known as T.S. Eliot. The poem was the lead poem of the book entitled "Prufrock, and other Observations" which was published by the Egoist, Ltd. Of London in 1917. The report tried to give my interpretation of the poem and the impact it had on the 20th century poetry circles. The report also provided a brief insight into the author's life as it pertained to this work. (Bentley & Brooker, 1990)
References
Bentley, Joseph, & Brooker, Jewel Spears (1990). Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Amhearst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Elliot, T.S. (1917). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Retrieved November 28, 2004, at http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
Poem
