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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

January 28, 2023

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse[2] at the instigation of Ezra Pound (1885–1972). It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet (or chapbook) titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917.[1] At the time of its publication, Prufrock was considered outlandish,[3] but is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th-century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Eliot
Cover page of The Egoist, Ltd.'s publication of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
Original titlePrufrock Among the Women
First published inJune 1915 issue of Poetry[2]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Publishermagazine (1915): Harriet Monroe
chapbook (1917): The Egoist, Ltd. (London)[1]
Lines140
Pages6 (1915 printing)[2]
8 (1917 printing)[1]
Full text
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at Wikisource

The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri[4] and makes several references to the Bible and other literary works—including William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV Part II, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet, the poetry of seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, and the nineteenth-century French Symbolists. Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said "to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment".[5]

Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognized voices in modern literature.[6]

Composition and publication history

 
T. S. Eliot in 1923, photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell

Writing and first publication

Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" between February 1910 and July or August 1911. Shortly after arriving in England to attend Merton College, Oxford, Eliot was introduced to American expatriate poet Ezra Pound, who instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and aided the start of Eliot's career. Pound served as the overseas editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and recommended to the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe, that Poetry publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", extolling that Eliot and his work embodied a new and unique phenomenon among contemporary writers. Pound claimed that Eliot "has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other, but never both."[7] The poem was first published by the magazine in its June 1915 issue.[2][8]

In November 1915 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—along with Eliot's poems "Portrait of a Lady", "The Boston Evening Transcript", "Hysteria", and "Miss Helen Slingsby"—was included in Catholic Anthology 1914–1915 edited by Ezra Pound and printed by Elkin Mathews in London.[9]: 297  In June 1917 The Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, published a pamphlet entitled Prufrock and Other Observations (London), containing 12 poems by Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was the first in the volume.[1] Eliot was appointed assistant editor of the Egoist in June 1917.[9]: 290 

Prufrock's Pervigilium

According to Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon, when Eliot was writing the first drafts of "Prufrock" in his notebook in 1910–1911, he intentionally kept four pages blank in the middle section of the poem.[10] According to the notebooks, now in the collection of the New York Public Library, Eliot finished the poem, which was originally published sometime in July and August 1911, when he was 22 years old.[11] In 1912, Eliot revised the poem and included a 38-line section now called "Prufrock's Pervigilium" which was inserted on those blank pages, and intended as a middle section for the poem.[10] However, Eliot removed this section soon after seeking the advice of his fellow Harvard acquaintance and poet Conrad Aiken.[12] This section would not be included in the original publication of Eliot's poem but was included when published posthumously in the 1996 collection of Eliot's early, unpublished drafts in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917.[11] This Pervigilium section describes the "vigil" of Prufrock through an evening and night[11]: 41, 43–44, 176–90  described by one reviewer as an "erotic foray into the narrow streets of a social and emotional underworld" that portray "in clammy detail Prufrock's tramping 'through certain half-deserted streets' and the context of his 'muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.'"[13]

Critical reception

Critical publications initially dismissed the poem. An unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement from 1917 found: "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone – even to himself. They certainly have no relation to 'poetry,' [...]."[14][15] Another unsigned review from the same year imagined Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'"[3]

The Harvard Vocarium at Harvard College recorded Eliot's reading of Prufrock and other poems in 1947, as part of its ongoing series of poetry readings by its authors.[16]

Description

Title

In his early drafts, Eliot gave the poem the subtitle "Prufrock among the Women."[11]: 41  This subtitle was apparently discarded before publication. Eliot called the poem a "love song" in reference to Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Love Song of Har Dyal", first published in Kipling's collection Plain Tales from the Hills (1888).[17] In 1959, Eliot addressed a meeting of the Kipling Society and discussed the influence of Kipling upon his own poetry:

Traces of Kipling appear in my own mature verse where no diligent scholarly sleuth has yet observed them, but which I am myself prepared to disclose. I once wrote a poem called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": I am convinced that it would never have been called "Love Song" but for a title of Kipling's that stuck obstinately in my head: "The Love Song of Har Dyal".[17]

However, the origin of the name Prufrock is not certain, and Eliot never remarked on its origin other than to claim he was unsure of how he came upon the name. Many scholars and indeed Eliot himself have pointed towards the autobiographical elements in the character of Prufrock, and Eliot at the time of writing the poem was in the habit of rendering his name as "T. Stearns Eliot", very similar in form to that of J. Alfred Prufrock.[18] It is suggested that the name "Prufrock" came from Eliot's youth in St. Louis, Missouri, where the Prufrock-Litton Company, a large furniture store, occupied one city block downtown at 420–422 North Fourth Street.[19][20][21] In a 1950 letter, Eliot said: "I did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any recollection of having acquired this name in any way, but I think that it must be assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated."[22]

Epigraph

The draft version of the poem's epigraph comes from Dante's Purgatorio (XXVI, 147–148):[11]: 39, 41 

He finally decided not to use this, but eventually used the quotation in the closing lines of his 1922 poem The Waste Land. The quotation that Eliot did choose comes from Dante also. Inferno (XXVII, 61–66) reads:

In context, the epigraph refers to a meeting between Dante Alighieri and Guido da Montefeltro, who was condemned to the eighth circle of Hell for providing counsel to Pope Boniface VIII, who wished to use Guido's advice for a nefarious undertaking. This encounter follows Dante's meeting with Ulysses, who himself is also condemned to the circle of the Fraudulent. According to Ron Banerjee, the epigraph serves to cast ironic light on Prufrock's intent. Like Guido, Prufrock had never intended his story to be told, and so by quoting Guido, Eliot reveals his view of Prufrock's love song.[25]

Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from a split personality of sorts, and that he embodies both Guido and Dante in the Inferno analogy. One is the storyteller; the other the listener who later reveals the story to the world. He posits, alternatively, that the role of Guido in the analogy is indeed filled by Prufrock, but that the role of Dante is filled by the reader ("Let us go then, you and I"). In that, the reader is granted the power to do as he pleases with Prufrock's love song.[26]

Themes and interpretation

Because the poem is concerned primarily with the irregular musings of the narrator, it can be difficult to interpret. Laurence Perrine wrote, "[the poem] presents the apparently random thoughts going through a person's head within a certain time interval, in which the transitional links are psychological rather than logical".[27] This stylistic choice makes it difficult to determine exactly what is literal and what is symbolic. On the surface, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" relays the thoughts of a sexually frustrated middle-aged man who wants to say something but is afraid to do so, and ultimately does not.[27][28] The dispute, however, lies in to whom Prufrock is speaking, whether he is actually going anywhere, what he wants to say, and to what the various images refer.

The intended audience is not evident. Some believe that Prufrock is talking to another person[29] or directly to the reader,[30] while others believe Prufrock's monologue is internal. Perrine writes "The 'you and I' of the first line are divided parts of Prufrock's own nature",[27] while professor emerita of English Mutlu Konuk Blasing suggests that the "you and I" refers to the relationship between the dilemmas of the character and the author.[31] Similarly, critics dispute whether Prufrock is going somewhere during the course of the poem. In the first half of the poem, Prufrock uses various outdoor images (the sky, streets, cheap restaurants and hotels, fog), and talks about how there will be time for various things before "the taking of a toast and tea", and "time to turn back and descend the stair." This has led many to believe that Prufrock is on his way to an afternoon tea, where he is preparing to ask this "overwhelming question".[27] Others, however, believe that Prufrock is not physically going anywhere, but rather, is playing through it in his mind.[30][31]

Perhaps the most significant dispute lies over the "overwhelming question" that Prufrock is trying to ask. Many believe that Prufrock is trying to tell a woman of his romantic interest in her,[27] pointing to the various images of women's arms and clothing and the final few lines in which Prufrock laments that the mermaids will not sing to him. Others, however, believe that Prufrock is trying to express some deeper philosophical insight or disillusionment with society, but fears rejection, pointing to statements that express a disillusionment with society, such as "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" (line 51). Many believe that the poem is a criticism of Edwardian society and Prufrock's dilemma represents the inability to live a meaningful existence in the modern world.[32] McCoy and Harlan wrote "For many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment."[30]

In general, Eliot uses imagery which is indicative of Prufrock's character,[27] representing aging and decay. For example, "When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table" (lines 2–3), the "sawdust restaurants" and "cheap hotels", the yellow fog, and the afternoon "Asleep...tired... or it malingers" (line 77), are reminiscent of languor and decay, while Prufrock's various concerns about his hair and teeth, as well as the mermaids "Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black," show his concern over aging.

Use of allusion

Like many of Eliot's poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" makes numerous allusions to other works, which are often symbolic themselves.

  • In "Time for all the works and days of hands" (29) the phrase 'works and days' is the title of a long poem – a description of agricultural life and a call to toil – by the early Greek poet Hesiod.[27]
  • "I know the voices dying with a dying fall" (52) echoes Orsino's first lines in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.[27]
  • The prophet of "Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter / I am no prophet — and here's no great matter" (81–2) is John the Baptist, whose head was delivered to Salome by Herod as a reward for her dancing (Matthew 14:1–11, and Oscar Wilde's play Salome).[27]
  • "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (92) and "indeed there will be time" (23) echo the closing lines of Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'. Other phrases such as, "there will be time" and "there is time" are reminiscent of the opening line of that poem: "Had we but world enough and time".[27]
  • "'I am Lazarus, come from the dead'" (94) may be either the beggar Lazarus (of Luke 16) returning for the rich man who was not permitted to return from the dead to warn the brothers of a rich man about Hell, or the Lazarus (of John 11) whom Jesus Christ raised from the dead, or both.[27]
  • "Full of high sentence" (117) echoes Geoffrey Chaucer's description of the Clerk of Oxford in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.[27]
  • "There will be time to murder and create" is a biblical allusion to Ecclesiastes 3.[27]
  • In the final section of the poem, Prufrock rejects the idea that he is Prince Hamlet, suggesting that he is merely "an attendant lord" (112) whose purpose is to "advise the prince" (114), a likely allusion to Polonius — Polonius being also "almost, at times, the Fool."
  • "Among some talk of you and me" may be[33] a reference to Quatrain 32 of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam ("There was a Door to which I found no Key / There was a Veil past which I could not see / Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee / There seemed — and then no more of Thee and Me.")
  • "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each" has been suggested transiently to be a poetic allusion to John Donne's "Song: Go and catch a falling star" or Gérard de Nerval's "El Desdichado", and this discussion used to illustrate and explore the intentional fallacy and the place of poet's intention in critical inquiry.[34]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Eliot, T. S. Prufrock and Other Observations (London: The Egoist, Ltd., 1917), 9–16.
  2. ^ a b c d Eliot, T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Monroe, Harriet (editor), Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (June 1915), 130–135.
  3. ^ a b Eliot, T. S. (21 December 2010). The Waste Land and Other Poems. Broadview Press. p. 133. ISBN 978-1-77048-267-8. Retrieved 9 July 2017. (citing an unsigned review in Literary Review. 5 July 1917, vol. lxxxiii, 107.)
  4. ^ Hollahan, Eugene (March 1970). "A Structural Dantean Parallel in Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'". American Literature. 1. 42 (1): 91–93. doi:10.2307/2924384. ISSN 0002-9831. JSTOR 2924384.
  5. ^ McCoy, Kathleen; Harlan, Judith (1992). English Literature From 1785. London, England: HarperCollins. pp. 265–66. ISBN 006467150X.
  6. ^ Bercovitch, Sacvan (2003). The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 5. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 99. ISBN 0521497310.
  7. ^ Mertens, Richard (August 2001). "Letter By Letter". The University of Chicago Magazine. Retrieved 23 April 2007.
  8. ^ Southam, B.C. (1994). A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. New York City: Harcourt, Brace & Company. p. 45. ISBN 057117082X.
  9. ^ a b Miller, James Edward (2005). T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American poet, 1888–1922. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 297–299. ISBN 0271026812.
  10. ^ a b Gordon, Lyndell (1988). Eliot's New Life. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. 45. ISBN 9780198117278.
  11. ^ a b c d e Eliot, T. S. (1996). Ricks, Christopher B. (ed.). Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917. New York City: Harcourt, Brace, and World. ISBN 9780544363878.
  12. ^ Mayer, Nicholas B. (2011). "Catalyzing Prufrock". Journal of Modern Literature. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 34 (3): 182–198. doi:10.2979/jmodelite.34.3.182. JSTOR 10.2979/jmodelite.34.3.182. S2CID 201760537.
  13. ^ Jenkins, Nicholas (20 April 1997). "More American Than We Knew: Nerves, exhaustion and madness were at the core of Eliot's early imaginative thinking". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  14. ^ Waugh, Arthur (October 1916). . Quarterly Review (805): 299. Archived from the original on 10 February 2012.
  15. ^ Wagner, Erica (4 September 2001). "An eruption of fury". The Guardian.
  16. ^ Woodberry Poetry Room (Harvard College Library). Poetry Readings: Guide
  17. ^ a b Eliot, T.S. (March 1959). "The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling". Kipling Journal: 9.
  18. ^ Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot. (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1988). 1:135.
  19. ^ Montesi, Al; Deposki, Richard (2001). Downtown St. Louis. Mount Pleasant, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing. p. 65. ISBN 0-7385-0816-0.
  20. ^ Christine H. The Daily Postcard: Prufrock-Litton – St. Louis, Missouri. Retrieved 21 February 2012.
  21. ^ Missouri History Museum. Lighting fixture in front of Prufrock-Litton Furniture Company. Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  22. ^ Stepanchev, Stephen (June 1951). "The Origin of J. Alfred Prufrock". Modern Language Notes. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University. 66 (6): 400–401. doi:10.2307/2909497. JSTOR 2909497.
  23. ^ Eliot provided this translation in his essay "Dante" (1929).
  24. ^ Alighieri, Dante (1320). Divine Comedy. Translated by Hollander, Robert; Hollander, Jean. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Dante Project.
  25. ^ Banerjee, Ron D. K. "The Dantean Overview: The Epigraph to 'Prufrock'" in Comparative Literature. (1972) 87:962–966. JSTOR 2907793
  26. ^ Locke, Frederick W. (January 1963). "Dante and T. S. Eliot's Prufrock". Modern Language Notes. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University. 78 (1): 51–59. doi:10.2307/3042942. JSTOR 3042942.
  27. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Perrine, Laurence (1993) [1956]. Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. New York City: Harcourt, Brace & World. p. 798. ISBN 978-0035510705.
  28. ^ "On 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' ", Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois (accessed 20 April 2019).
  29. ^ Headings, Philip R. T. S. Eliot. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 24–25.
  30. ^ a b c Hecimovich, Gred A (editor). English 151-3; T. S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" notes (accessed 14 June 2006), from McCoy, Kathleen; Harlan, Judith. English Literature from 1785. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
  31. ^ a b Blasing, Mutlu Konuk (1987). "On 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'". American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300037937.
  32. ^ Mitchell, Roger (1991). "On 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'". In Myers, Jack; Wojahan, David (eds.). A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0809313480.
  33. ^ Schimanski, Johan (at Universitetet i Tromsø). Retrieved 8 August 2006.
  34. ^ Wimsatt, W. K. Jr.; Beardsley, Monroe C. (1954). "The Intentional Fallacy". . Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press. ISBN 978-0813101118. Archived from the original on 22 August 2004.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)

Further reading

  • Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949).
  • Gallup, Donald. T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended Edition) (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1969), 23, 196.
  • Luthy, Melvin J. "The Case of Prufrock's Grammar" in College English (1978) 39:841–853. JSTOR 375710.
  • Soles, Derek. "The Prufrock Makeover" in The English Journal (1999), 88:59–61. JSTOR 822420.
  • Sorum, Eve. "Masochistic Modernisms: A Reading of Eliot and Woolf." Journal of Modern Literature. 28 (3), (Spring 2005) 25–43. doi:10.1353/jml.2005.0044.
  • Sinha, Arun Kumar and Vikram, Kumar. "'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' (Critical Essay with Detailed Annotations)" in T. S. Eliot: An Intensive Study of Selected Poems (New Delhi: Spectrum Books Pvt. Ltd, 2005).
  • Walcutt, Charles Child. "Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'" in College English (1957) 19:71–72. JSTOR 372706.

External links

 
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
  • An omnibus collection of T. S. Eliot's poetry at Standard Ebooks
  • Original text from Poetry magazine June 1915
  • Text and extended audio discussion of the poem
  • The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at the British Library
  • Prufrock and Other Observations at Project Gutenberg
  •   Prufrock public domain audiobook at LibriVox (Whole book & multiple versions of the one poem)

January 28, 2023
love, song, alfred, prufrock, commonly, known, prufrock, first, professionally, published, poem, american, born, british, poet, eliot, 1888, 1965, eliot, began, writing, prufrock, february, 1910, first, published, june, 1915, issue, poetry, magazine, verse, in. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock commonly known as Prufrock is the first professionally published poem by American born British poet T S Eliot 1888 1965 Eliot began writing Prufrock in February 1910 and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry A Magazine of Verse 2 at the instigation of Ezra Pound 1885 1972 It was later printed as part of a twelve poem pamphlet or chapbook titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917 1 At the time of its publication Prufrock was considered outlandish 3 but is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrockby T S EliotCover page of The Egoist Ltd s publication of Prufrock and Other Observations 1917 Original titlePrufrock Among the WomenFirst published inJune 1915 issue of Poetry 2 CountryUnited StatesLanguageEnglishPublishermagazine 1915 Harriet Monroechapbook 1917 The Egoist Ltd London 1 Lines140Pages6 1915 printing 2 8 1917 printing 1 Full textThe Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock at WikisourceThe poem s structure was heavily influenced by Eliot s extensive reading of Dante Alighieri 4 and makes several references to the Bible and other literary works including William Shakespeare s plays Henry IV Part II Twelfth Night and Hamlet the poetry of seventeenth century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell and the nineteenth century French Symbolists Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers The poem described as a drama of literary anguish is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual and represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment 5 Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress and is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love With visceral feelings of weariness regret embarrassment longing emasculation sexual frustration a sense of decay and an awareness of mortality Prufrock has become one of the most recognized voices in modern literature 6 Contents 1 Composition and publication history 1 1 Writing and first publication 1 2 Prufrock s Pervigilium 1 3 Critical reception 2 Description 2 1 Title 2 2 Epigraph 2 3 Themes and interpretation 2 4 Use of allusion 3 See also 4 Notes 5 Further reading 6 External linksComposition and publication history Edit T S Eliot in 1923 photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell Writing and first publication Edit Eliot wrote The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock between February 1910 and July or August 1911 Shortly after arriving in England to attend Merton College Oxford Eliot was introduced to American expatriate poet Ezra Pound who instantly deemed Eliot worth watching and aided the start of Eliot s career Pound served as the overseas editor of Poetry A Magazine of Verse and recommended to the magazine s founder Harriet Monroe that Poetry publish The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock extolling that Eliot and his work embodied a new and unique phenomenon among contemporary writers Pound claimed that Eliot has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN The rest of the promising young have done one or the other but never both 7 The poem was first published by the magazine in its June 1915 issue 2 8 In November 1915 The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock along with Eliot s poems Portrait of a Lady The Boston Evening Transcript Hysteria and Miss Helen Slingsby was included in Catholic Anthology 1914 1915 edited by Ezra Pound and printed by Elkin Mathews in London 9 297 In June 1917 The Egoist a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden published a pamphlet entitled Prufrock and Other Observations London containing 12 poems by Eliot The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock was the first in the volume 1 Eliot was appointed assistant editor of the Egoist in June 1917 9 290 Prufrock s Pervigilium Edit According to Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon when Eliot was writing the first drafts of Prufrock in his notebook in 1910 1911 he intentionally kept four pages blank in the middle section of the poem 10 According to the notebooks now in the collection of the New York Public Library Eliot finished the poem which was originally published sometime in July and August 1911 when he was 22 years old 11 In 1912 Eliot revised the poem and included a 38 line section now called Prufrock s Pervigilium which was inserted on those blank pages and intended as a middle section for the poem 10 However Eliot removed this section soon after seeking the advice of his fellow Harvard acquaintance and poet Conrad Aiken 12 This section would not be included in the original publication of Eliot s poem but was included when published posthumously in the 1996 collection of Eliot s early unpublished drafts in Inventions of the March Hare Poems 1909 1917 11 This Pervigilium section describes the vigil of Prufrock through an evening and night 11 41 43 44 176 90 described by one reviewer as an erotic foray into the narrow streets of a social and emotional underworld that portray in clammy detail Prufrock s tramping through certain half deserted streets and the context of his muttering retreats Of restless nights in one night cheap hotels 13 Critical reception Edit Critical publications initially dismissed the poem An unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement from 1917 found The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone even to himself They certainly have no relation to poetry 14 15 Another unsigned review from the same year imagined Eliot saying I ll just put down the first thing that comes into my head and call it The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock 3 The Harvard Vocarium at Harvard College recorded Eliot s reading of Prufrock and other poems in 1947 as part of its ongoing series of poetry readings by its authors 16 Description EditTitle Edit In his early drafts Eliot gave the poem the subtitle Prufrock among the Women 11 41 This subtitle was apparently discarded before publication Eliot called the poem a love song in reference to Rudyard Kipling s poem The Love Song of Har Dyal first published in Kipling s collection Plain Tales from the Hills 1888 17 In 1959 Eliot addressed a meeting of the Kipling Society and discussed the influence of Kipling upon his own poetry Traces of Kipling appear in my own mature verse where no diligent scholarly sleuth has yet observed them but which I am myself prepared to disclose I once wrote a poem called The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock I am convinced that it would never have been called Love Song but for a title of Kipling s that stuck obstinately in my head The Love Song of Har Dyal 17 However the origin of the name Prufrock is not certain and Eliot never remarked on its origin other than to claim he was unsure of how he came upon the name Many scholars and indeed Eliot himself have pointed towards the autobiographical elements in the character of Prufrock and Eliot at the time of writing the poem was in the habit of rendering his name as T Stearns Eliot very similar in form to that of J Alfred Prufrock 18 It is suggested that the name Prufrock came from Eliot s youth in St Louis Missouri where the Prufrock Litton Company a large furniture store occupied one city block downtown at 420 422 North Fourth Street 19 20 21 In a 1950 letter Eliot said I did not have at the time of writing the poem and have not yet recovered any recollection of having acquired this name in any way but I think that it must be assumed that I did and that the memory has been obliterated 22 Epigraph Edit The draft version of the poem s epigraph comes from Dante s Purgatorio XXVI 147 148 11 39 41 sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor Poi s ascose nel foco che gli affina be mindful in due time of my pain Then dived he back into that fire which refines them 23 He finally decided not to use this but eventually used the quotation in the closing lines of his 1922 poem The Waste Land The quotation that Eliot did choose comes from Dante also Inferno XXVII 61 66 reads S io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun s i odo il vero Senza tema d infamia ti rispondo If I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world this tongue of flame would cease to flicker But since up from these depths no one has yet returned alive if what I hear is true I answer without fear of being shamed 24 In context the epigraph refers to a meeting between Dante Alighieri and Guido da Montefeltro who was condemned to the eighth circle of Hell for providing counsel to Pope Boniface VIII who wished to use Guido s advice for a nefarious undertaking This encounter follows Dante s meeting with Ulysses who himself is also condemned to the circle of the Fraudulent According to Ron Banerjee the epigraph serves to cast ironic light on Prufrock s intent Like Guido Prufrock had never intended his story to be told and so by quoting Guido Eliot reveals his view of Prufrock s love song 25 Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from a split personality of sorts and that he embodies both Guido and Dante in the Inferno analogy One is the storyteller the other the listener who later reveals the story to the world He posits alternatively that the role of Guido in the analogy is indeed filled by Prufrock but that the role of Dante is filled by the reader Let us go then you and I In that the reader is granted the power to do as he pleases with Prufrock s love song 26 Themes and interpretation Edit Because the poem is concerned primarily with the irregular musings of the narrator it can be difficult to interpret Laurence Perrine wrote the poem presents the apparently random thoughts going through a person s head within a certain time interval in which the transitional links are psychological rather than logical 27 This stylistic choice makes it difficult to determine exactly what is literal and what is symbolic On the surface The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock relays the thoughts of a sexually frustrated middle aged man who wants to say something but is afraid to do so and ultimately does not 27 28 The dispute however lies in to whom Prufrock is speaking whether he is actually going anywhere what he wants to say and to what the various images refer The intended audience is not evident Some believe that Prufrock is talking to another person 29 or directly to the reader 30 while others believe Prufrock s monologue is internal Perrine writes The you and I of the first line are divided parts of Prufrock s own nature 27 while professor emerita of English Mutlu Konuk Blasing suggests that the you and I refers to the relationship between the dilemmas of the character and the author 31 Similarly critics dispute whether Prufrock is going somewhere during the course of the poem In the first half of the poem Prufrock uses various outdoor images the sky streets cheap restaurants and hotels fog and talks about how there will be time for various things before the taking of a toast and tea and time to turn back and descend the stair This has led many to believe that Prufrock is on his way to an afternoon tea where he is preparing to ask this overwhelming question 27 Others however believe that Prufrock is not physically going anywhere but rather is playing through it in his mind 30 31 Perhaps the most significant dispute lies over the overwhelming question that Prufrock is trying to ask Many believe that Prufrock is trying to tell a woman of his romantic interest in her 27 pointing to the various images of women s arms and clothing and the final few lines in which Prufrock laments that the mermaids will not sing to him Others however believe that Prufrock is trying to express some deeper philosophical insight or disillusionment with society but fears rejection pointing to statements that express a disillusionment with society such as I have measured out my life with coffee spoons line 51 Many believe that the poem is a criticism of Edwardian society and Prufrock s dilemma represents the inability to live a meaningful existence in the modern world 32 McCoy and Harlan wrote For many readers in the 1920s Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and impotence of the modern individual He seemed to represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment 30 In general Eliot uses imagery which is indicative of Prufrock s character 27 representing aging and decay For example When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table lines 2 3 the sawdust restaurants and cheap hotels the yellow fog and the afternoon Asleep tired or it malingers line 77 are reminiscent of languor and decay while Prufrock s various concerns about his hair and teeth as well as the mermaids Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black show his concern over aging Use of allusion Edit Like many of Eliot s poems The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock makes numerous allusions to other works which are often symbolic themselves In Time for all the works and days of hands 29 the phrase works and days is the title of a long poem a description of agricultural life and a call to toil by the early Greek poet Hesiod 27 I know the voices dying with a dying fall 52 echoes Orsino s first lines in William Shakespeare s Twelfth Night 27 The prophet of Though I have seen my head grown slightly bald brought in upon a platter I am no prophet and here s no great matter 81 2 is John the Baptist whose head was delivered to Salome by Herod as a reward for her dancing Matthew 14 1 11 and Oscar Wilde s play Salome 27 To have squeezed the universe into a ball 92 and indeed there will be time 23 echo the closing lines of Marvell s To His Coy Mistress Other phrases such as there will be time and there is time are reminiscent of the opening line of that poem Had we but world enough and time 27 I am Lazarus come from the dead 94 may be either the beggar Lazarus of Luke 16 returning for the rich man who was not permitted to return from the dead to warn the brothers of a rich man about Hell or the Lazarus of John 11 whom Jesus Christ raised from the dead or both 27 Full of high sentence 117 echoes Geoffrey Chaucer s description of the Clerk of Oxford in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales 27 There will be time to murder and create is a biblical allusion to Ecclesiastes 3 27 In the final section of the poem Prufrock rejects the idea that he is Prince Hamlet suggesting that he is merely an attendant lord 112 whose purpose is to advise the prince 114 a likely allusion to Polonius Polonius being also almost at times the Fool Among some talk of you and me may be 33 a reference to Quatrain 32 of Edward FitzGerald s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam There was a Door to which I found no Key There was a Veil past which I could not see Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee There seemed and then no more of Thee and Me I have heard the mermaids singing each to each has been suggested transiently to be a poetic allusion to John Donne s Song Go and catch a falling star or Gerard de Nerval s El Desdichado and this discussion used to illustrate and explore the intentional fallacy and the place of poet s intention in critical inquiry 34 See also Edit The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock in popular cultureNotes Edit a b c d Eliot T S Prufrock and Other Observations London The Egoist Ltd 1917 9 16 a b c d Eliot T S The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock in Monroe Harriet editor Poetry A Magazine of Verse June 1915 130 135 a b Eliot T S 21 December 2010 The Waste Land and Other Poems Broadview Press p 133 ISBN 978 1 77048 267 8 Retrieved 9 July 2017 citing an unsigned review in Literary Review 5 July 1917 vol lxxxiii 107 Hollahan Eugene March 1970 A Structural Dantean Parallel in Eliot s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock American Literature 1 42 1 91 93 doi 10 2307 2924384 ISSN 0002 9831 JSTOR 2924384 McCoy Kathleen Harlan Judith 1992 English Literature From 1785 London England HarperCollins pp 265 66 ISBN 006467150X Bercovitch Sacvan 2003 The Cambridge History of American Literature Vol 5 Cambridge England Cambridge University Press p 99 ISBN 0521497310 Mertens Richard August 2001 Letter By Letter The University of Chicago Magazine Retrieved 23 April 2007 Southam B C 1994 A Guide to the Selected Poems of T S Eliot New York City Harcourt Brace amp Company p 45 ISBN 057117082X a b Miller James Edward 2005 T S Eliot The Making of an American poet 1888 1922 University Park Pennsylvania Pennsylvania State University Press pp 297 299 ISBN 0271026812 a b Gordon Lyndell 1988 Eliot s New Life Oxford England Oxford University Press p 45 ISBN 9780198117278 a b c d e Eliot T S 1996 Ricks Christopher B ed Inventions of the March Hare Poems 1909 1917 New York City Harcourt Brace and World ISBN 9780544363878 Mayer Nicholas B 2011 Catalyzing Prufrock Journal of Modern Literature Bloomington Indiana Indiana University Press 34 3 182 198 doi 10 2979 jmodelite 34 3 182 JSTOR 10 2979 jmodelite 34 3 182 S2CID 201760537 Jenkins Nicholas 20 April 1997 More American Than We Knew Nerves exhaustion and madness were at the core of Eliot s early imaginative thinking The New York Times Retrieved 12 June 2013 Waugh Arthur October 1916 The New Poetry Quarterly Review 805 299 Archived from the original on 10 February 2012 Wagner Erica 4 September 2001 An eruption of fury The Guardian Woodberry Poetry Room Harvard College Library Poetry Readings Guide a b Eliot T S March 1959 The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling Kipling Journal 9 Eliot T S The Letters of T S Eliot New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1988 1 135 Montesi Al Deposki Richard 2001 Downtown St Louis Mount Pleasant South Carolina Arcadia Publishing p 65 ISBN 0 7385 0816 0 Christine H The Daily Postcard Prufrock Litton St Louis Missouri Retrieved 21 February 2012 Missouri History Museum Lighting fixture in front of Prufrock Litton Furniture Company Retrieved 11 June 2013 Stepanchev Stephen June 1951 The Origin of J Alfred Prufrock Modern Language Notes Baltimore Maryland Johns Hopkins University 66 6 400 401 doi 10 2307 2909497 JSTOR 2909497 Eliot provided this translation in his essay Dante 1929 Alighieri Dante 1320 Divine Comedy Translated by Hollander Robert Hollander Jean Princeton New Jersey Princeton Dante Project Banerjee Ron D K The Dantean Overview The Epigraph to Prufrock in Comparative Literature 1972 87 962 966 JSTOR 2907793 Locke Frederick W January 1963 Dante and T S Eliot s Prufrock Modern Language Notes Baltimore Maryland Johns Hopkins University 78 1 51 59 doi 10 2307 3042942 JSTOR 3042942 a b c d e f g h i j k l m Perrine Laurence 1993 1956 Literature Structure Sound and Sense New York City Harcourt Brace amp World p 798 ISBN 978 0035510705 On The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock Modern American Poetry University of Illinois accessed 20 April 2019 Headings Philip R T S Eliot Boston Twayne Publishers 1982 24 25 a b c Hecimovich Gred A editor English 151 3 T S Eliot The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock notes accessed 14 June 2006 from McCoy Kathleen Harlan Judith English Literature from 1785 New York HarperCollins 1992 a b Blasing Mutlu Konuk 1987 On The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock American Poetry The Rhetoric of Its Forms New Haven Connecticut Yale University Press ISBN 0300037937 Mitchell Roger 1991 On The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock In Myers Jack Wojahan David eds A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry Carbondale Illinois Southern Illinois University Press ISBN 0809313480 Schimanski Johan Annotasjoner til T S Eliot The Love Song of J Alfred Prufock at Universitetet i Tromso Retrieved 8 August 2006 Wimsatt W K Jr Beardsley Monroe C 1954 The Intentional Fallacy The Verbal Icon Studies in the Meaning of Poetry Lexington Kentucky University of Kentucky Press ISBN 978 0813101118 Archived from the original on 22 August 2004 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint unfit URL link Further reading EditDrew Elizabeth T S Eliot The Design of His Poetry New York Charles Scribner s Sons 1949 Gallup Donald T S Eliot A Bibliography A Revised and Extended Edition New York Harcourt Brace amp World 1969 23 196 Luthy Melvin J The Case of Prufrock s Grammar in College English 1978 39 841 853 JSTOR 375710 Soles Derek The Prufrock Makeover in The English Journal 1999 88 59 61 JSTOR 822420 Sorum Eve Masochistic Modernisms A Reading of Eliot and Woolf Journal of Modern Literature 28 3 Spring 2005 25 43 doi 10 1353 jml 2005 0044 Sinha Arun Kumar and Vikram Kumar The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock Critical Essay with Detailed Annotations in T S Eliot An Intensive Study of Selected Poems New Delhi Spectrum Books Pvt Ltd 2005 Walcutt Charles Child Eliot s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock in College English 1957 19 71 72 JSTOR 372706 External links Edit Wikisource has original text related to this article The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock An omnibus collection of T S Eliot s poetry at Standard Ebooks Original text from Poetry magazine June 1915 Text and extended audio discussion of the poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock at the British LibraryPrufrock and Other Observations at Project Gutenberg Annotated hypertext version of the poem Prufrock public domain audiobook at LibriVox Whole book amp multiple versions of the one poem Portal Poetry Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock amp oldid 1116672070, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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