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Thomas Stearns Eliot, Or T.S. Eliot, Was Born In 1888 On

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Thomas Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot, was born in 1888 on the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. Throughout his life, Eliot wrote and published several pieces of writing that are highly regarded and still studied in the world of literature today. Eliot was an American-British author, critic, playwright, and poet. After attending Smith Academy, and Milton Academy, he went on to graduate in just 3 years at Harvard University. He also got his masters and did doctoral work. He attended Oxford, but ultimately left for England after a short amount of time. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” attracted the most attention out of all of Eliot’s poems. Just some of the many techniques used throughout the whole passage are dramatic monologue …show more content…

Eliot also uses figures of speech in this passage to establish the theme of death. Eliot described the afternoon as “spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table.” (Eliot 2) in the beginning of the passage, he is describing the sky as a patient on an operating table under anesthesia. Again, in a later stanza, he says it “sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, asleep … tired … or it malingers, stretched on the floor.” (Eliot 75-78). This metaphor is being echoed through the passage, presenting an eerie and dark setting. This relates directly back to the reoccurring theme of death and isolation with his use of fearsome imagery. He obscures the long description of the sky using fragmentation, breaking up the different images into smaller parts and placing them in different stanzas in the passage. Another figure of speech used is personification. “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.” (Eliot 15) Eliot uses personification to turn the yellow fog into a fearful and timid cat, which represents the fear in Prufrock, and helps indicate the theme of doubt that we see frequently when he tries to make decisions. A technique that frequently

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