Eliot finds it impossible to actually unveil the mystery and tell all, it is not only that complete knowledge of the universe is impossible, but that the mystery even when reached and experienced, as when hearing the luring song of the mermaids, it can not be told.
This distance from mystery is due also to the modernist consumerist society, as Daly noticed in his study:
Where Marx imagined commodity fetishism coming to an end only with the demise of capitalism itself, Hemingway sees a new relation to objects arising through a qualitative change in the subject, through a mutation in appetite T.S. Eliot's typically ineffectual modern subject, J. Alfred Prufrock, has to wonder if he dares to eat a peach [..] "(Daly, 152)
Thus, the main theme of the poem is the discrepancy between modernism and the primitive, between , 1999
Ferrall, Charles. Modernist Writing & Reactionary Politics.
Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2001
Goldman, Jane. Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apocalypse.
Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004
Lamos, Colleen. Deviant Modernism: Sexual & Textual Errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce & Marcel Proust.
Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1999
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Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot, and the Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost are two poems that imagine how life might be if the narrator had acted differently. However, the two poems are almost opposites in their intent and impact. Eliot's poem is a lamentation over a life not lived, over a failure to act. Frost's poem is a celebration over an unconventional life bravely
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