This poem, the earliest of Eliot’s major works, was completed in 1910 or 1911 but not published until 1915. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man — overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to ‘force the moment to its crisis’ by somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to ‘dare’ an approach to the woman: In his mind he hears the comments others make about his inadequacies, and he chides himself for ‘presuming’ emotional interaction could be possible at all. The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for Eliot) physical settings — a cityscape (the famous ‘patient etherized upon a table’) and several interiors (women’s arms in the lamplight, coffee spoons, fireplaces) — to a series of vague ocean images conveying Prufrock’s emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his second-rate status (‘I am not Prince Hamlet’).
‘Prufrock’ is powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the vividness of character achieved.
Form ‘Prufrock’ is a variation on the dramatic monologue, a type of poem popular with Eliot’s predecessors. Dramatic monologues are similar to soliloquies in plays. Three things characterize the dramatic monologue, according to M. H. Abrams.
The Essay on “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
In the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, the main character, J. Alfred Prufrock is seen as an anti-hero. His character and identity comes through strongly in the poem as a shy and introverted man who is socially inept, extremely self conscious, lacking in self confidence and wallowing in self-pity, yet desiring for people to notice him. The composer shows this ...
First, they are the utterances of a specific individual (not the poet) at a specific moment in time. Secondly, the monologue is specifically directed at a listener or listeners whose presence is not directly referenced but is merely suggested in the speaker’s words. Third, the primary focus is the development and revelation of the speaker’s character. Eliot modernizes the form by removing the implied listeners and focusing on Prufrock’s inferiority and isolation. The epigraph to this poem, from Dante’s Inferno, describes Prufrock’s ideal listener: one who is as lost as the speaker and will never betray to the world the content of Prufrock’s present confessions.
In the world Prufrock describes, though, no such sympathetic figure exists, and he must, therefore, be content with silent reflection. In its focus on character and its dramatic sensibility, ‘Prufrock’ anticipates Eliot’s later, dramatic works. The rhyme scheme of this poem is irregular but not random. While sections of the poem may resemble free verse, in reality, ‘Prufrock’ is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic forms. The bits and pieces of rhyme become much more apparent when the poem is read aloud.
One of the most prominent formal characteristics of this work is the use of refrains. Prufrock’s continual return to the ‘women [who] come and go / Talking of Michelangelo’ and his recurrent questionings (‘how should I presume?’ ) and pessimistic appraisals (‘That is not it, at all.’ ) both reference an earlier poetic tradition and help Eliot describe the consciousness of a modern, neurotic individual. Prufrock’s obsessiveness is aesthetic, but it is also a sign of compulsiveness and isolation. Another important formal feature is the use of fragments of sonnet form, particularly at the poem’s conclusion. The three three-line stanzas are rhymed as the conclusion of a Petrarchan sonnet would be, but their pessimistic, anti-romantic content, coupled with the despairing interjection, ‘I do not think they (the mermaids) would sing to me,’ creates a contrast that comments bitterly on the bleakness of modernity.
