We will live in a world of uncertainty, but one in which hope remains present. The Fisher King is a king who failed in his charge to guard the grail and was wounded either in the leg or in the thigh (with implications of impotence). The Holy Grail is the cup Christ used at the Last Supper. There are multiple references to the quest for the Holy Grail and to the Fisher King. Alfred Prufrock is Prufrocks inability to perform his mating display. There is a suggestion that if modern people shift their values, there is hope-even for an old man such as Prufrock, to take the risk and find the love that he has fled all his life. The central tension in The Love Song of J. At the end of the poem there is a shift from “I” to “we,” which suggests that all of us in modernity live lives without passion and without risk. But love and sex are illustrations-Prufrock’s real focus is on living a life of risk and passion whatever that risk or passion might be. His “love life” is without meaning, more of a “sex without love” life than a love life, as he moves from one casual encounter to another. Prufrock feels worthless and uses a number of metaphors to express this feeling: his baldness, the butt-end of cigarettes, lobster claws-and unlike Hamlet, his suffering fails to ennoble him, but rather accentuates his degeneracy. Like Eliot’s other great modernist works, the poem is in the form of a collage which makes it difficult to follow, despite Eliot’s use of “objective correlatives” to induce a particular emotional response in the reader. Like Pound, the narrator’s emotions are communicated through imagery, in this case metaphor over metaphor. He invites the reader into his world by using romantic imagery followed by grim imagery, as Dante invites us in with the lure of a mysterious deep words and the presence of the great Roman poet Virgil. Prufrock clearly considers his crimes to be such that he is the scum of the earth, one of Dante’s damned souls confessing from the depths of hell. Rather, focusing on similar issues to the post-World War II existentialists, he confesses to the crime of living a life without passion and without risk. Yet it is not a typical confessional poem, for Prufrock, an old, unattached man, is not confessing any conventional sin/crime such as murder or adultery. Alfred Prufrock” offers the reader a fragmented, painful confession of an old man that reflects the state of modern society. GradeSaver, 13 August 2002 Web.Michaelpotts“The Love Song of J.
Next Section Themes Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format Wayne, Teddy. However, this remains a dangerous assumption, as Eliot famously maintained in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the "progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. Stearns Eliot," and we can assume that Eliot shared at least some of Prufrock's anxieties over women, though he clearly satirizes Prufrock's neuroses (and, thus, his own) at points in the poem. Alfred Prufrock" name echoes Eliot's style at the time of signing his name "T. The poem is very much a young man's work, though its speaker, through dramatic monologue, is a presumably middle-aged man.
The collection established Eliot's reputation as a Modernist poet to be reckoned with, and "Prufrock" detailed many of the techniques and themesĮliot would expand with " The Waste Land" and later works: vocal fragmentation and allusiveness, a precision of imagery borrowed from the 19th-century French Symbolists, a condemnation of the sterility of the modern world, and a dry, self-conscious wit. First published in the Chicago magazine Poetry in June 1915, "Prufrock" later headlined Eliot's first book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). He revised it over the next couple of years, changing the title to " The Love Song of J. Eliot started writing "Prufrock Among the Women" in 1909 as a graduate student at Harvard.