Who Is T. S. Eliot Exemplifies Everyday Anxiety?

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T. S. Eliot uses The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to highlight the everyday anxiety which stops humans from living meaningful lives. A few ways in which Eliot exemplifies this everyday anxiety is through the suppression of important thoughts or questions, a mundane hyper-focus on the trivial, and a crippling fear of other’s opinions.
One major idea throughout The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is the suppression of an important question. The first the reader hears of this question is in stanza 1, lines 10-12, “To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . / Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit” (10-12). Right in the beginning of the poem, Prufrock is suppressing this question by refusing to ask and refusing to answer when …show more content…

Posing the question but not directly stating, or answering, the question is one way in which Eliot makes the reader of this poem, about anxiety, feel more anxious. We are constantly looking for answers in our daily lives and being led on like this is anxiety-inducing for J. Alfred Prufrock and the reader as well. The second mention of this question comes in stanza six when Prufrock states, “There will be time to murder and create / And time for all the works and days of hands / That lift and drop a question on your plate, / Time for you and time for me” (823). In this example, the way in which Prufrock avoids the question is by stating that there will be time in the future. This is one of the universal human concerns, or experiences, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Even today, anxiety causes many to ignore the questions important to their lives, while pushing them off to be answered later. Eliot also points out how these heavy questions seem to come at random, being lifted and dropped on your plate. The third mention of this important question comes

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