384 Eliot, T. S.
Although the imagery and number of examples
may seem excessive to modern readers, part of the
persuasive power of the piece rests on Edwards’s
ability to combine theoretical ideas with practical
applications, all the while employing extremely vivid
images to convey ideas of spiritual suffering. While
it might appear that the excessive nature of such
images of suffering and wrath could turn away pos-
sible converts, Edwards uses the images, in part, to
make a case for the urgency of conversion, insofar
as the price of not converting is an extreme form of
spiritual suffering.
Jeff Pettineo
ELIOT, T. S. The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock (1915)
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was T. S.
Eliot’s first published poem. An early example of
the modernist long poem in free verse, the poem
anticipates many of the themes of The waste
Land (1922); however, its use of a clearly identified
protagonist narrating a monologue to a hypnotic
rhythm makes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Pru-
frock” a far more accessible, coherent text.
Originally entitled “Prufrock Among the
Women,” the poem charts the mental life—and
implied psychological breakdown—of a socially
awkward persona given the odd name “Prufrock.”
Though the poem can be read on one level as an
exploration of Prufrock’s failure to connect with
women, it is perhaps more productive to perceive
the poem as a wider study of the fragility and futility
of human existence—that this is not just Prufrock’s
“song” but society’s “song.” Perhaps this is why
singing and music feature so heavily in the poem,
from the musical “voices dying with a dying fall” to
the mermaids “singing, each to each”: Everyone is
involved in trying to communicate and make sense
of the world; very few can hear or comprehend each
other properly, and alienation and crises of iden-
tity ensue.
Whereas The Waste Land traces such anxieties
across multiple spaces and temporal periods, “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” predominantly
focuses on an unspecified city (probably London) in
the modern period, though it is no less intense in its
treatment of the nightmare of Western civilization
at a time of unprecedented worldwide conflict.
Sarah BarnsleyalienatiOn in “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is concerned
with the personal and social alienation of the poem’s
protagonist. Estranged from his nerves, which take
leave of the body to show up like photo negatives
on a magic lantern’s screen, Prufrock is unable to
indulge in sensual pleasures. Like the image of
the evening, which is compared to an anesthetized
patient, he is numb to external reality. His auditory
senses are dulled in a world where music plays in
a distant room and voices are heard “dying.” Fog
and smoke meanders insidiously throughout the
landscape, hampering the visual senses. Eating has
little pleasure for him and is associated with anxiety.
A plate holds a question that Prufrock continually
struggles to ask; he visualizes his own head “on a
platter” (l. 82) like the head of John the Baptist;
having tea is preceded by “a hundred indecisions”
(l. 32) or followed by the fear that he may be called
to “force the moment to its crisis” (l. 80). Eventu-
ally Prufrock is unsure whether he has the ability,
or will, to eat a simple peach. He sees himself as a
powerless, dehumanized creature, identifying with a
cat, “muzzled” and locked out of the house like fog
against closed windows, or an insect mounted on
a pin, “wriggling” helplessly. As his psychological
disintegration unfolds, he longs to be a pair of sev-
ered crab claws “scuttling across the floors of silent
seas” (l. 74), as far removed from the human world
as possible.
This desire to be cut off is a result of the intense
social alienation Prufrock recounts as he wanders
through streets that are “half-deserted” as if in
retreat from his very presence. His separation from
women is articulated through a refrain set apart
from the main body of the poem, mirroring Pru-
frock’s exclusion (“In the room the women come
and go / Talking of Michelangelo” [ll. 13–14]).
The reference to women moving in a group is no
accident: Not only do they prefigure the group
of mermaids Prufrock later encounters (who he
expects will also exclude him), they contrast with