Similarities And Similarities Between Dante And Prufrock

Prufrock Vs. Dante

T.S. Eliot once said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” When you become so immersed in a type of writing and types of stories you tend to reflect and talk about these works as well and this may be why both of the characters in Dante’s “Inferno” And Eliot’s “A Love Song” were so similar, yet different. The first six lines of the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” written by T. Eliott is actually a quote from another poem named “The Epigraph written by Dante Alighieri; Prufrock is hinting right away the similarities between these two stories. T.S. Eliot would imitate the writing of authors he

Prufrock on one hand cares too much on too small 
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 of things, for example in the stories he finds himself asking whether or not to ask this life changing question, and then directly after he can’t seem to decide if he should wear his pant legs rolled up or down. Prufrock wastes the entire poem agonizing over the possible answer of the question he is about to ask to the reader of the poem who would be his lover. His reputation is at stake because rejection is a great fear of his so throughout the entire poem he says things like, “How should I begin?” where he is so nervous about what the listener will think he can’t even start to say what he needs to. On the other hand, one of the main character’s in Dante’s Inferno” also cares about what people will think but his reasons are much more significant. Montefeltro said, “"If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement.” When he said this he was basically saying that if he thought there was even the slightest chance that his honest story would get shared to people he knew of Earth he wouldn’t share how he got there. Unfortunately for Montefeltro, his listener was one of the few who had ever made it to Hell and back and his story was shared with others. For the most part Prufrock’s fears were

Prufrock became a coward as the poem A Love Song unfolded more and more and while in the beginning Dante appeared to be wise he turned out to be prideful and a traitor. Prufrock throughout the whole entire poem was simply trying to communicate his undying love to the woman he cared about. However he was too afraid to lay his feelings out on the table. In the poem he starts to justify his inaction by saying that he has done many things in his life like drink a lot of coffee, and survived lots of days, and he has many other things to be concerned about with his life just trying to justify that he never stepped up to life and asked the important question. Similarly, Dante lived a life to be proud of yet one of his most terrible 
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actions was that he thought he could outsmart God by justifying his behavior. Dante basically committed war crimes but did so knowing he would come to God and get repentance. That is not genuine repentance because he thought God would have had to give it to him anyways. Dante was just looking for an excuse to cover up the negative and ugly parts of himself and his past. Obviously, Prufrock and Montefeltro were immoral men because they both lied to themselves to cover up who they really were; Prufrock was a coward afraid to initiate love and Dante was a liar afraid for his intentions to be