Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay

The use of allusions bring a sense of intimacy between reader and author. Prufrock wishes to be comforted.

Construct a close reading of this poem that demonstrates your awareness of the poet’s body of work.

J. Alfred Prufrock constantly lived in fear, in fear of life and death. T. S. Eliot divided his classic poem into three equally important sections. Each division provided the reader with insight into the mental structure of J. Alfred Prufrock. In actuality, Prufrock maintained a good heart and a worthy instinct, but he never seemed to truly exist. A false shadow hung over his existence. Prufrock never allowed himself to actually live. He had no ambitions that would drive him to succeed. The poem is a silent cry for help from Prufrock. In each section, T. S. Eliot provided his audience with vague attempts to understand J. Alfred Prufrock. Each individual reader can only interpret these

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot is a poem unlike any I have ever read before. The poem starts off with the speaker taking what seems to be a potential lover along for a walk. The speaker first describes their surroundings and says that “the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table” and that “the streets follow like a tedious argument”. The sky is described as someone who has been anesthetized, someone who can’t feel anything. The streets are like an argument, something that can tear two people apart. The similes used make the setting seem dark and dreary. The speaker then brings up that he has a question he wishes to

      Yet this darker revelation is quickly eclipsed by one last happy irony, a revelation of sorts: the poem so artfully represents it subject, its conspicuous ingenuities of form so undulate and glitter like the mist of mayflies, that the poem itself becomes the mayflies?or means to come as close as language can take it.  As a special way of seeing, the poem means to breech the gulf between seer and thing seen and thus forge a connection to the object world, the speaker?s own absence from which he ostensibly laments.  That this attempt is successful seems implicit in the last lines of the poem.  There, it occurs to the speaker that his sense of separateness and mortality can be allayed by the idea that he has been ?called? to be a poetic seer, ?one whose task is joyfully to see/ How fair

The dramatic monologue “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was written by Thomas Stearns Eliot and published in June of 1915. Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri on September 26, 1888, where he grew up and lived until the age of eighteen. After high school, Eliot studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA and the Sorbonne in Paris, France. Eventually, Eliot ended up in England where he married his wife Vivien and spent the remainder of his life.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an ironic depiction of a man’s inability to take decisive action in a modern society that is void of meaningful human connection. The poem reinforces its central idea through the techniques of fragmentation, and through the use of Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world. Using a series of natural images, Eliot uses fragmentation to show Prufrock’s inability to act, as well as his fear of society. Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world is also evident throughout. At no point in the poem did Prufrock confess his love, even though it is called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, but through this poem, T.S. Eliot voices his social commentary about the world that

We will also see questioning come up many times throughout the poem. By questioning himself so much, the reader may infer that he is very indecisive and doubtful. Thirdly, another line that the author will repeat throughout this poem is "In the room, women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.” This can perhaps tell the reader that the author is living in a society in which the talk of popular artists is something common.

Furthermore, poetry, and the personification of poetry, conversations with old friends and family, should not need a special occasion, rather it should “ride the bus” with patience for the stops before your own and the understanding of other’s needs before your own (line 13). You can also say the bus can represent the speed at which life passes you by and how easy it is to miss something if you are not paying attention, or even, that these missed moments have a poem to help you along your long journey home. With the use of

Loneliness is a feeling that we have all felt here and there. A man in the poem “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S Eliot feels trapped which caused him to have disorders. Nothing has never changed from living in the same city and not using his time wisely. He tried numerous ways to approach women but his low self esteem stopped him from moving forward. Although Prufrock seems like a miserable person, Prufrock suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and paranoia that caused him to feel this way.

T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is dedicated to the theme of loneliness and alienation. The narrator of the poem is a middle aged man who has low self-esteem and is full of pessimism person. He invites us to a small journey though the poem during which he describes his emotion, the people he sees and his surroundings. From his descriptions, we can know that he is not satisfied with his life because he thinks life made him dull and bored. In addition, it seems that nothing in the world brings pleasure to the narrator. Nothing brings him positive emotions.

When reading the title of T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” it is believed we are in store for a poem of romance and hope. A song that will inspire embrace and warmth of the heart, regretfully this is could not be further from the truth. This poem takes us into the depths of J. Alfred Prufrock, someone who holds faltering doubt and as a result may never come to understand real love. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” takes us through Prufrock’s mindset and his self-doubting and self-defeating thoughts. With desolate imagery, a tone that is known through the ages and delicate diction we see a man who is insecure, tentative and completely fearful.

Although this is a short poem, there are so many different meanings that can come from the piece. With different literary poetic devices such as similes, imagery, and symbolism different people take away different things from the poem. One of my classmates saw it as an extended metaphor after searching for a deeper connection with the author. After some research on the author, we came to learn that the

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot is not a love song at all—but an insight into the mind of an extremely self-conscious, middle-aged man. Prufrock struggles in coping with the world he is living in—a world where his differences make him feel lonely and alienated. Eliot uses allusions and imagery, characterization, and the society Prufrock lives in to present how Prufrock partly contributes to his own alienation. Our ability of self-awareness separates us from other species, making humans more intelligent and giving people the upper hand in social settings, but, like Prufrock, it can sometimes cause us to feel alienated.

Prufrock begins his “Love” song with a peculiar quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy. It reads: “If I believed that my answer were to a person who could ever return to the world, this flame would no longer quiver. But because no one ever returned from this depth, if what I hear is true, without fear of infamy, I answer you.” In the Divine Comedy these lines are spoken by a damned soul who had sought absolution before committing a crime. I think that Eliot chose this quote to show that Prufrock is also looking for absolution, but for what he is unsure.