The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

In college Eliot met the love of his life and he soon married Vivien Haigh-Wood. This would make Eliot a new person in the way he would write and view the world. He self trained himself to make his writing more modern in efforts to reach a bigger crowd (Bush). These efforts would eventually pay off with writings like Ulysses, The Wasteland, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. These writings would give T.S Eliot the strength to quit his job in a local bank and live off the success of his writings. Eliot used his life struggles as his inspiration to create his successful writings just like how he used it to create Prufrock in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

By looking through a critical lens at T Stearns Eliot’s poetry in light of his 20th century, modernist context, much is revealed about his personal and the rapidly evolving societal beliefs of that era. Through his repeating motif of time and fragmentation throughout his poems, Eliot reveals the prevalent feelings of isolation while in society along with the need to hide one’s feelings and emotions in this degrading society. His exploration of the use of ambiguity and stream of consciousness by Eliot, which is a characteristic of modernist artists, allows his work to resound over decades while being interpreted and differently understood by every audience that encounters them.

T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” illustrates the fear of the fragmentation of society today. In the poem, Eliot creates the persona of Prufrock. Prufrock is speaking to an unknown listener. The persona of Prufrock is Eliot’s interpretation of Western society and its impotency. His views on society is seen as a modernistic point of view, which idolizes the ideas to regress back to a classicist era. Eliot illustrates his contempt for the modern society by illustrating fragmentation with synecdoche, characterization of Prufrock, and allusions to literary traditions throughout the narrative. In his poem, Eliot clings to the idea of a classical society in which he is witnessing fall apart.

Through the work of his mother and grandfather TS Eliot became aware of poverty and the boring reality of peoples' lives.

Throughout his college years, Eliot was active in the writing of literature, even having some of his early poetry published in the Harvard Advocate. In England, Eliot met and befriended fellow expatriate Ezra Pound, who was very

T.S. Eliot characterizes his speaker in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” based on his own personal experiences. In 1915, Eliot wrote one of his most famous poems as a skeptic (Schneider 1103). He constantly questioned the meaning of human life and the reasons why human beings were created at all. In the same way, Prufrock also has a difficult time in finding the purpose of his long life. The speaker of this poem takes the reader on a journey so that maybe the listener can aid him in finding meaning to his life. Throughout T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the narrator is overwhelmed by the nothingness in his life through the characterization of himself, the wandering to many different settings, and the feeling of death approaching him.

The last stanza shows how the speaker will die and his physical body will be gone, but art will stay forever. That is how the old man will leave his mark on the world.

¨The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock¨, a poem by T.S. Eliot, was written shortly after WW1, a war that left millions dead or scarred for life. The subject of this poem, J. Alfred Prufrock is a victim of this terrible event. After the war, his life has drastically changed. Feelings of insignificance, looking a fool, and growing old are all characterized by Eliot’s repetition for effect, ambiguity, and allusion.

T.S Eliot was the most famous English poet of his time, and he was one of the most influential poet. His distinctive style of writing took the attention of not only other poets, but many people all over the world. “Thomas Stearns Eliot is best known as a poet and literary critic (he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948), but his work in social and cultural theory has also been widely influential”(Edwards). T.S. Eliot's style of writing was mostly a pessimistic view on life. One of the best examples of his pessimistic view on life comes from his work The Hollow Men. The Hollow Men is a short part of the title The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. The Hollow

T.S. .Eliot is a person that believed to be a very cynical man.. T.S. Eliot wrote the poem The Hollow Men which is about

            I think this style of writing is also a reflection of Eliot's feelings about the time.  Eliot was more of a Modernist than Victorian poet and as such held to beliefs like: there is no higher power in the universe, man is alone on this planet to govern his own affairs, everyone is truly alone, there is no unity, no support, for we live in a godless heartless world (Stacey Donohue).  The floating, confusing, jumbled mix of emotions and directions in this poem mirrors the modernist image of society.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” draws attention to the idea that time is of the essence. On the surface, Prufrock is portrayed as a man who is incapable of making decisions and lacks self-confidence. This is evident through his passive nature, where he continuously delays having to talk to women because he believes there is enough time. Written in the era of modernism, the reader is capable of unraveling that the poem’s true purpose was not only to show Prufrock’s inability to make decisions when it comes to love, but to show the desolation that one faces in times of a modernistic transition. Eliot depicts Prufrock’s transition phase through a gloomy and solemn tone, incorporating imagery, metaphor and synecdoche to

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a poem by T.S. Eliot, provides an abundant source of material for applying Freudian analysis.[1] Specifically, it is the character Prufrock who supplies this rich source. Although many Freudian themes could have been addressed in relation to Prufrock, in this paper it will be narrowed to the prevalent themes of ambivalence and cultural frustration found in Freudπs work and the contributing role the super-ego plays in their occurrence. In fact, Prufrock exemplifies ambivalence and its necessary conditions so well that Freud himself would have probably labeled him a neurotic.

The context of any given text whether poetry, novels or a movie is always integral to its understanding. Social and historical context of not only the given text, but the writer’s context and reader’s context play an important role in the interpretation and understanding of the major ideas, issues, values and beliefs within the text. T.S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot was one of the twentieth century’s major poets and still remains relevant today. For many, Eliot and his works synonymous with Modernism; his “use of myth to undergird and order atomized modern experience; its collage-like juxtaposition of

   Thomas Stearns Eliot was not a revolutionary, yet he revolutionized the way the Western world writes and reads poetry. Some of his works were as imagist and incomprehensible as could be most of it in free verse, yet his concentration was always on the meaning of his language, and the lessons he wished to teach with them. Eliot consorted with modernist literary iconoclast Ezra Pound but was obsessed with the traditional works of Shakespeare and Dante. He was a man of his time yet was obsessed with the past. He was born in the United States, but later became a royal subject in England. In short, Eliot is as complete and total a