The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, By T. S. Eliot

Lonely Manifestation The poem called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was written during the early 1900s and was published in 1915 (Longxing). The poem was one of the modernistic works written by one of the well-known authors named T. S Eliot. Modernism, a type of writing written in the early 1900s after World War I, focuses on the negative aspects of reality (Pearce). Since Eliot wrote the poem during the modernism era, the poem portrays the loneliness, failure, and depression of a man’s life. The poem is about a man named J. Alfred Prufrock who does not know how to talk to women because of his lack of confidence. The poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is the essence of a modern man because Prufrock is a man who feels lonely in a

Although he wants to fall in love, he fails to tell a woman how he feels because he does not want to be denied in front of other people. For example, he states, “And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin/When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall/Then how should I begin” (823) and he thinks about how other people will judge him by his unattractive looks. Since Prufrock’s insecurity stays on his mind, he focuses more on what other people think instead of what he should think about himself. He feels trapped within his own body and only thinks about how unsuccessful his life is. Since he is so uncomfortable within his own body, he does not even give a woman the opportunity to love him. Prufrock wants to escape life of humanity, so he dreams. Even though his dreams are unhappy just like his life, he wants to stay in his dreams because he knows when he wakes up he has to live in the destruction of humanity. People’s unhappiness and rejection during this time period led people to feel depressed. Since Eliot wrote the poem to portray the destruction of life during the modernistic time period, he wanted to show how nothing about life really mattered to the people