Eliot's Inferiority Exposed in Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Sweeney Among the
Nightingales
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" tells the story of a single
character, a timid, middle-aged man. Prufrock is talking or thinking to
himself. The epigraph, a dramatic speech taken from Dante's "Inferno,"
provides a key to Prufrock's nature. Like Dante's character Prufrock is in
"hell," in this case a hell of his own feelings.
He is both the "you and I" of line one, pacing the city's grimy
streets on his lonely walk. He observes the foggy evening settling down on
him. Growing more and more hesitant he postpones the moment of his
decision by telling himself "And indeed there will be time."
Prufrock is aware of his monotonous routines and is frustrated, "I
have measured out my life with coffee spoons":. He contemplates the
aimless pattern of his divided and solitary self. He is a lover, yet he is
unable to declare his love. Should a middle-aged man even think of making
a proposal of love? "Do I dare/Disturb the universe?" he asks.
Prufrock knows the women in the saloons "known them all" and he
presumes how they classify him and he feels he deserves the classification,
because he has put on a face other than his own. "To prepare a face to meet
the faces that you meet." He has always done what he was socially supposed
to do, instead of yielding to his own natural feelings. He wrestles with
his desires to change his world and with his fear of their rejection. He
imagines how foolish he would feel if he were to make his proposal only to
discover that the woman had never thought of him as a possible lover; he
imagines her brisk, cruel response; "That is not what I meant, at all."
He imagines that she will want his head on a platter and they did
with the prophet John the Baptist. He also fears the ridicule and
snickers of other men when she rejects him.
Prufrock imagines "And would it have been worth it, after all," and
if she did not reject him it would bring him back to life and he could say
one page 11) this indicates that he is a selfish man and cares for his
Each literary work portrays something different, leaving a unique impression on all who read that piece of writing. Some poems or stories make one feel happy, while others are more solemn. This has very much to do with what the author is talking about in his or her writing, leaving a bit of their heart and soul in the work. F. Scott Fitzgerald, when writing The Great Gatsby, wrote about the real world, yet he didn’t paint a rosy picture for the reader. The same can be said about T.S. Eliot, whose poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” presents his interpretation of hell. Both pieces of writing have many similarities, but the most similar of them all is the tone of each one.
... until he does complete his quest of individuation, he shall never be nor feel whole.
these days.” He says that since he was not made to be a lover, he has
of which he knows, but he enjoys it being that way. He doesn’t seek the relational
his intentions are to receive justification that he is truly loved by having his daughters
...nd love for himself and his life mirrored by the unnamed narrator in “Where I’m Calling From.”
are examined closer, it is evident that he is a limited and vain person who is overly concerned with
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Three waves of systems theory were developed (Healy, 2005). The first wave, being General systems theory. General systems theory is about focussing on a more effective social order for the client,...
For Eliot, poetic representation of a powerful female presence created difficulty in embodying the male. In order to do so, Eliot avoids envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies. We can see this process clearly in "The Love Song of J. Prufrock." The poem circles around not only an unarticulated question, as all readers agree, but also an unenvisioned center, the "one" whom Prufrock addresses. The poem never visualizes the woman with whom Prufrock imagines an encounter except in fragments and in plurals -- eyes, arms, skirts - synecdoches we might well imagine as fetishistic replacements. But even these synecdochic replacements are not clearly engendered. The braceleted arms and the skirts are specifically feminine, but the faces, the hands, the voices, the eyes are not. As if to displace the central human object it does not visualize, the poem projects images of the body onto the landscape (the sky, the streets, the fog), but these images, for all their marked intimation of sexuality, also avoid the designation of gender (the muttering retreats of restless nights, the fog that rubs, licks, and lingers). The most visually precise images in the poem are those of Prufrock himself, a Prufrock carefully composed – "My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, / My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin" -- only to be decomposed by the watching eyes of another into thin arms and legs, a balding head brought in upon a platter. Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock are themselves, as Pinkney observes, terrifyingly unstable, attributes constituting the identity of the subject at one moment only to be wielded by the objective the next, like the pin that centers his necktie and then pinions him to the wall or the arms that metamorphose into Prufrock's claws. The poem, in these
apart, a lonely and isolated figure, out of touch with his own age and without
so that he might learn to bear the sight of his own person but also so that he