Eliot, T' S' Thomas Stearns, The Love Song of J' Alfred Prufrock

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Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock

• 20/04/2009

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Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (written
  between 1910-1911 and published for the first
  time in 1915 in the magazine Poetry).
• In the whole collection the subject sees the
  world and is seen by it (continually modified /
  conditioned by his relation with the outside
  world)
• No narrative development, although it contains
  the elements of a narrative.
• Life cannot be reduced to plots

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Themes

• Elite, people, roads, harbours as setting
• Alienated humanity
• 13         In the room the women come and go
  14        Talking of Michelangelo.
  (repetitions, refrain)
• Loneliness and lack of communication
• 70           Shall I say, I have gone at dusk
  through narrow streets 71        And watched the
  smoke that rises from the pipes 72        Of
  lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of
  windows?..

4
Communication

• It does not matter whether they speak or not
  there is a radical undermining of the circuit of
  communication
• 'That is not what I meant at all. 98      
     That is not it, at all.'
• J.A. Prufrock is subject and object at one and
  the same time, so he cannot be a character. Irony
  does not confer identity and does not save him
• 131      Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
  

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• Characters are not defined in psychological
  terms, or in a confessional romantic mode they
  are measured in relation with the outside world
  city, street, day and night (especially dawn and
  dusk). Tension subject / object develops along
  these lines
• A) mental topography / urban topography
• B) perception of space and time / day and night
• C) character as mask / tea as a social ceremony

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Serpieri

• 1) reality depends on perception, the point of
  view of the subject but there is no
  hierarchical dependence, not a privileging of the
  subject. The subject is exposed and appears in
  pieces.
• It is not just a matter of being unable to
  express what one has inside, because the world
  wouldnt understand, but a more radical sense of
  incommunicability, due to the lack of a
  privileged perspective.

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• Prufrock is you, I, we, a pair of ragged
  claws, a prophet, Lazarus, Hamlet.
• A split subject
• 82        Though I have seen my head (grown
  slightly bald) brought in upon a platter
• Destined to grow old, but always-already old.
• The use of And and parataxis.
• Epigraph from Dantes Inferno (Canto XXVII)
• (Guido da Montefeltro)

8

• Public and private
• Prufrocks confession is possible only because,
  paradoxically, there is no audience as such. The
  audience becomes complicit it is implicated
  (You! Hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, - mon
  frère!, The Waste Land from Baudelaire).
• Pro-nominal comedy

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Stephen Ullmann

• 1) Anthropomorphic metaphors (Human non human)
• 2) Animal metaphors (non human-human)
• 3) Transfer of sense from concrete to abstract
  and viceversa
• 4) synesthetic metaphors (from one sense to
  another
• In Prufrock, mostly 1) and 3)

10
Leo Salingar

• The speaker is vague, but the images are
  distinct.
• Reaching forward only to fall back (Let us go)
• Rhyming couplets and irregular verse, fixity and
  flux (streets retreats hotels shells)
• Fixity and flux hard, gritty objects vs
  fluctuating and evasive thoughts.
• Hints of something permanent which Prufrock can
  dimly perceive but cannot grasp.