Love Song of J. Alfred

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

This report is about the poem called 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' by Thomas Sterns Eliot better known as T.S. Eliot. The poem was published in the book titled "Prufrock, and other Observations" which was published by the Egoist, Ltd. Of London in 1917. The report tries to give my interpretation of the poem and the impact it had on the 20th century poetry circles. The report also provides a brief insight into the author's life as it pertains to this work.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born into a prominent family in St. Louis in 1888 and he passed away in 1965. His family had well established New England roots so he was never lacking. It is said that Eliot abandoned the Midwest because he thoroughly enjoyed the New England area. He attended and graduated from Harvard with both undergraduate and graduate degrees and he also studied abroad extensively. He was a well-known and highly renowned writer of 16th and 17th century poetry and was acknowledged for his attention to detail with symbolic images of the renaissance which became his trademark for the newly created philosophy of Modernism.

His first book was the "Prufrock and Other Observations" which obviously included the poem this report is about. His first book was well received by those new found Modernists and Eliot accentuated these ideals in later works. Historians have demonstrated his particular love of Italian Renaissance work with a special fondness for Dante. Eliot's love for Dante's work is expressed by his opening in the 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' which is a direct quotation from Dante's Inferno (XXVII, 61-66).

I believe the poem was meant to give the external world a little look into Eliot's (or J. Alfred Prufrock's) scrambled emotions because he was a man who was in love. The problem seemed to be that he, as a person, was disappointed because he wanted much more than he the rest of the world seemed to be aspiring to. These thoughts seemed to include his potential wife. Because of his own self-motivation, Eliot (or J. Alfred Prufrock) seemed as though he felt that society needed a kick in the butt to get it going but he did not wish to be ridiculed for those inner feelings. "The principle Eliot applies to societies can be extended to refer to texts, with internal and external interpretations referring to the distinction between interpretations occurring within the text and interpretations made by the reader of the text." (Bentley & Brooker, 1990, p. 157)

The inner turmoil was made worse because he felt as though life was passing him by and there he also had an impending fear of death which eventually takes us all. His lines 'a bald spot, weak teeth making him fear food' and 'I grow old... 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)