![]() Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, p. Eliot, 4th edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), pp. B.C Southam, ed., A Student’s Guide to The Selected Poems of T. Jeremy Hawthorn, Studying the Novel, 4th edn (London: Arnold, 2001), p. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (The University of Texas). Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, p. by B.C Southam (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1978), pp. F.R Leavis, “‘Prufrock’, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘Gerontion’ (1932),” in “Prufrock”, “Gerontion”, Ash Wednesday and Other Shorter Poems: A Casebook, ed. Eliot depicts the mind of the modern man and the frustration of modern. It expresses the barrenness, the mental tension, the frustration and the irresolution of the modern man. Alfred Prufrock is a symbolic poem which gives the mood of the modern city-dweller. His poetry at times appears both conforming, and aggressively challenging tradition. Symbols and images reflect the mood of modern city-dweller : The Love Song of J. Eliot’s use of quotation is interesting as it is often highly ambiguous whether he is intending to defer to or subvert the authority of the literature he quotes and in fact often appears to be doing one whilst doing the other. Eliot’s use of quotation has been described as a way of connecting his poetry to tradition. Quotation may be used either to defer to the sources authority, or to subvert it through mockery. When Eliot refers to a ‘simultaneous order’ of literary tradition in Tradition and the Individual Talent these works are all part of the canon of literature he is referring to. Throughout the poem, Eliot makes reference to a wide variety of literature, including works by Dante, Shakespeare, Hesiod, Ecclesiastes, Marvell and Donne, Chaucer and The Gospels. However, although the poem is overtly modernist in its form and themes, Prufrock is not without its ties to tradition. An interest in the internal voices and struggles of characters is a common theme in modernist writing, as opposed to nineteenth century descriptions of the external challenges characters face. ![]() Prufrock himself has been described as not so much a character, as a consciousness rising and falling. ![]() While John Stuart Mill’s described of poetry as ‘overheard speech,’ can often be readily applied to nineteenth-century poetry Prufrock is better described as overheard inner speech, fragments of thoughts, dream, and memory shifting in and out of focus, held in delicate balance. The fairly conventional opening couplet is followed by the unusual image of an etherized patient, which also breaks up the series of couplets which make up the rest of the stanza. The famous opening lines:Let us go then, you and I,When the evening is spread out against the skyLike a patient etherized upon a table subvert the reader’s expectations of both form and content. The poem is misleading, setting up certain expectations, and then subverting them. The metre is languid and complex, open to variation and interruption, sometimes hesitant, and sometimes abrupt. Leavis described Prufrock as ‘a complete break with the nineteenth-century tradition, and a new start.’ Certainly Prufrock is written in a distinctly modern form. Eliot’s poem also alludes to other famous works from canonical writers such as Shakespeare and Chaucer as a way to reveal Prufrock’s simplicity and obscurity as a poetic “hero” compared to figures like Prince Hamlet or the Clerk of Oxford in the Canterbury Tales.In 1932 F. While Kipling’s poem is a true love song between a woman and her returning lover, Eliot’s poem is a detached examination of Prufrock’s struggles to make sense of the world, and his many failed attempts at courting women. Though Eliot did borrow elements of the poem’s title from Rudyard Kipling’s “Love Song of Har Dyal,” he does so ironically. Eliot’s poetry considers life in an urban setting in which the hustle and bustle of city life are significant experiences, while a Romantic such as Wordsworth’s poetry considers life in a rural setting in which expansive fields of daffodils are the things immediately experienced. In the opening line, he encounters “half-deserted streets” and “one-night cheap hotels.” These aspects of life are a far cry from the elements of nature obsessed over by pre-modern Romantic poets. ![]() In his stream-of-consciousness musings on the world around him, Prufrock continually confronts aspects of the modern world. As such, Eliot’s poem enacts a move toward considering modernist poetry a way for understanding the world around us, not simply a way for reflecting on our unique experiences. Alfred Prufrock is a representative example of an urban man attempting to make sense of the world around him. While Romantics such as John Keats or Percy Bysshe Shelley dwelled on their own experiences of beauty in the natural world, Eliot’s titular character’s musings are meant to be read as both personal and shared. ![]() Another key feature of modernist poetry exemplified in “Prufrock” is its move from individual to universal experience. ![]()
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