Everything about The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock totally explained
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is the
1915 poem that marked the start of
T. S. Eliot's career as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. The poem, also referred to simply as
Prufrock, is one of the most anthologized 20th century poems in the
English language. The poem is a
dramatic monologue, a form that had been much favored by
Robert Browning, and uses the
"stream of consciousness" literary technique.
Composition and publication
Composed mainly between February 1910 and July or August 1911, the poem was first published in the June 1915 issue of
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (
Chicago) after
Ezra Pound, the magazine's foreign editor, persuaded
Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that Eliot was unique: "He 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." This was Eliot's first publication of a poem outside of school or university publications.
In June
1917,
The Egoist, a small publishing firm run by
Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, published a pamphlet entitled
Prufrock and Other Observations (
London), containing twelve poems by Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was the first poem in the volume.
Eliot's notebook of draft poems,
Inventions of the March Hare (published posthumously in 1996 by
Harcourt Brace), includes thirty-eight lines from the middle of the draft version of the poem that were withheld from the initial publication. This section, known as
Prufrock's Pervigilium, contains the "
vigil" of Prufrock through an evening and night.
The title
In the drafts, the poem had the subtitle
Prufrock among the Women. Eliot said "The Love Song of" portion of the title came from "The Love Song of Har Dyal," a poem by
Rudyard Kipling. The form of Prufrock's name is like the name that Eliot was using at the time: T. Stearns Eliot. It has been suggested that Prufrock comes from the German word "Prüfstein" meaning "
touchstone."
There was a "Prufrock-Littau Company" in
St Louis at the time Eliot lived there, a furniture store; in a 1950 letter, Eliot said, "I didn't 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."
The epigraph
In context, the
epigraph refers to a meeting between
Dante and
Guido da Montefeltro, who was condemned to the
eighth circle of Hell for providing false counsel to
Pope Boniface VIII. 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 intended his story never be told, and so by quoting Guido, Eliot reveals his view of Prufrock's love song.
Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from multiple personalities 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
you, the reader, as in "Let us go then, you and I," (1). In that, the reader is granted the power to do as he pleases with Prufrock's love song.
Although he finally chose not to use it, the draft version of the epigraph for the poem came from Dante's
Purgatorio (XXVI, 147-148):
» 'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor'.
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.
Eliot provided this translation in his essay "Dante" (1929):
» 'be mindful in due time of my pain'.
Then dived he back into that fire which refines them.
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 perciocchè giammai di questo fondo » Non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
One translation from the
Princeton Dante Project is:
» "If I thought my answer were given
to anyone who would ever return to the world,
» this flame would stand still without moving any further.
But since never from this abyss
» has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true,
without fear of infamy I answer you."
Interpretation
As it shows us only surface thought and images, it's considered difficult to interpret exactly what is going on in the poem.
Laurence Perrine wrote, "[thepoem] 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". The dispute, however, lies in who Prufrock is talking to, whether he's actually
going anywhere, what he wants to say, and what the various images refer to.
First of all, it isn't evident to whom the poem is addressed. Some believe that Prufrock is talking to another person or directly to the reader, 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", 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 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, in which he's preparing to ask this "overwhelming question". 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." As the poem uses the
stream of consciousness technique, it's often difficult to determine what is meant to be interpreted literally and what is symbolic, what is actual and what is subconscious imagery or both. In general, Eliot uses imagery which is indicative of Prufrock's character,
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 in and of themselves.
In the final section of the poem, Prufrock rejects the idea that he's Prince Hamlet suggesting that he's merely "an attendant lord" (112) whose purpose is to "advise the prince" (114), a likely allusion to Polonius. Prufrock also brings in a common Shakespearean element of the Fool, as he claims he's also "Almost, at times, the Fool."
"Among some talk of you and me" may be a reference to Quatrain 32 of Edward FitzGerald's first translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam ("There was a Door to which I found no Key / There was a Veil past which I couldn't see / Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE / There seemed - and then no more of THEE and ME.")Further Information
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