More a synopsis of emotional entanglement than a treatise on gender or sexuality, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” encapsulates the ennui and numbness of the modern world. The speaker reveals gender only tacitly, as through two separate mentions of encroaching baldness. The choral incantations of the women who “come and go/ talking of Michelangelo” refer to a bourgeoisie existence and do not reveal gender discrimination (lines 14;36). The speaker’s frustrated sexuality comes more from a lack of intimacy or authenticity in human relationships than from a desire for power or dominance. Therefore, accusations of misogyny against Eliot are unfounded, at least with regards to the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Prufrock, the speaker in Eliot’s poem, comes across as bitter and disillusioned as he muses about love and physical intimacy in human relationships. He shifts back and forth between a familiar, second person singular point of view to a more impersonal second person plural one throughout the poem. For example, the first line refers to “you and I,” as if the speaker wants to take one person on a special and almost mystical journey through “half-deserted streets,” (line...
The reference to a “patient etherized upon a table” presages the mentioning of the “yellow fog” (line 15) and “yellow smoke” (line 16) that could refer to opium given the nighttime imagery and the “one-night cheap hotels,” (line 6). Clearly, Prufrock is someone who has explored the darker realms of society and human existence, has partaken of the yellow smoke and the obliteration of daytime worries it entails. Sexuality is an illusion for Prufrock, something that only leads to emptiness and longing and not to spiritual or intellectual fulfillment.Works Cited
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Representative Poetry Online. https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/love-song-j-alfred-prufrock
Schlib, John and Clifford, John. Arguing About Literature. MacMillan, 2017.
That is not it, at all." (Eliot, 875) In these lines the poet makes a play upon words with the word "all": it is either to know all, or else not to be able to render one's meaning in a work of art. 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
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
As attitudes of literacy help students succeed in school, this is an important development to encourage. Thus, students should be encouraged to interpret "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" for themselves, learning that no right or wrong answer exists, and that literature is a conduit through which one can have a personal response. The following lesson plan can stand by itself or follow the teaching of the poem
T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell The poetic styles of T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell are so dissimilar, that it comes as something of a shock to realize how much the two poets had in common. Each came from a prominent Boston family, and was related to a President of Harvard University -- Eliot was a distant relation to Harvard's President Eliot, and attended Harvard as an undergraduate: Amy Lowell's brother would
.. 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
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
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