The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: modernism and historical context

TS Eliot REVISED

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot is indefeasibly a Modernist masterpiece. Yet how do we know it is modernist? Let me count the ways. Modernist poetry is often marked by complicated or difficult disjunctions in tone -- "J. Alfred Prufrock" which is capable of moodily swinging from the depressive lows of "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the floors of silent seas" to the manic highs of "I shall wear white flannel trousers and talk upon the beach / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each." Modernist poetry is often international in character and although in May of 1917, T.S. Eliot published Prufrock and Other Observations, his first collection of verse, in London, Eliot was not an Englishman but an American, and his poem uses Italian in the quotation from Dante that serves as epigraph and invokes characters from Shakepseare in the text. Finally another aspect of Modernist poetry is the disjunctive style, and I can prove this with reference to the irregular line lengths and rhyme schemes which Eliot imitates here from the French model of Jules Laforgue. Since these are the hallmarks of Modernist Poetry, I have shown that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is Modernist.

Modernist Poetry is marked by social and cultural displacement. Such social and cultural displacement was not unfamiliar to Eliot, however, even before the outset of his literary career and his permanent move from the United States to Britain. Likewise "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" begins as a transatlantic dramatic monologue spoken in Prufrock's voice, addressed to an imaginary companion or perhaps directly to the reader:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells

The very name of "J. Alfred Prufrock" -- which suggests solid if not stolid bourgeois propriety, and a stranger to these slightly raffish and downmarket locales Prufrock invokes. It would appear that Prufrock envisions an escape from the suffocating politesse of his own social milieu, summed up in the deadpan quasi-refrain repeated twice in the poem's opening: "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michaelangelo." This shows the social and cultural displacement of Modernism.

I have said that Modernism is allusive, and now I hope to show that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is allusive and therefore Modernist. To a certain extent, a "love song" is always easier for a spontaneous and passionate personality to express, rather than a fellow like Prufrock. We know, from the numerous allusions in the text, that Prufrock (no less than Eliot) is learned enough to drop coy references to the Classical poetry of Hesiod ("the works and days of hands"), Shakespeare's Twelfth Night ("the voices dying with a dying fall"), and the New Testament ("I am Lazarus, come from the dead.") This allusiveness is one of the chief hallmarks of Eliot's verse, and also helps to establish its Modernist bona fides: when one of the great foes of Modernism, the American poet and critic Yvor Winters, came to attack Eliot it was for this willingness to engage in referentiality beyond what the actual narrative described. Winters called Eliot's method one of "pseudo-reference," in which the poet makes "reference to a non-existent plot." To a certain degree this is true of Modernist poems generally, including "Prufrock": the women who talk of Michelangelo drift through the poem with no connection to a coherent story. Yet when Prufrock seems later in the poem to have focused his thoughts on a single woman, we do not know how to connect her to the earlier figures in the poem:

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward 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."

We never learn if Prufrock is contemplating marriage to one, or if they are his sisters, or if they are women he has not got the courage to introduce himself to -- and this is precisely Eliot's point. The fragments of narrative along with the scraps of clear allusion to other texts are meant to call attention to the collage-like surface that the poem presents thereby. All of these allusive methods, whether to literature or to story, are hallmarks of Modernism showing that a poem really doesn't get more Modernist than "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot.

Modernism expresses profound alienation -- but does J. Alfred Prufrock? Yet the near-satiric nature of Eliot's methods here will come to an astonishing conclusion, as Prufrock digs deeper and comes to the astonishing conclusion of the poem in which the two methods -- satiric and aloof on the one hand, and wild and untamed on the other, are combined:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.