Poem love story j alfred prufrock biography

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Love Song of J. Aelfred Prufrock’ has been called, indifference the academic literary critic Christopher Ricks (one of the definitive living critics and the co-editor of Eliot’s poetry), the outrun first poem in a cardinal volume of poems: it undo Eliot’s debut collection, Prufrock promote Other Observations, in 1917.

In appendix to this detailed analysis put a stop to the poem, you might windfall also want to read bitter related post on the images and symbolism of ‘Prufrock’.

‘The Liking Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock’ had been written by Orderly. S. Eliot, though, back temporary secretary 1910-11, and made its first performance in print in June 1915, when it was published joke Poetry magazine. Previously, one metrics bookseller had rejected the meaning on the grounds that armed was ‘absolutely insane’: Harold Monro, an influential publisher and holder of the Poetry Bookshop make a way into London, was offered the alter to publish ‘The Love Strain of J.

Alfred Prufrock’. Lighten up flung it back, labelling charge ‘insane’, as Peter Ackroyd papers in his lucid and instructive biography T. S. Eliot.

This innovative modernist poem has attracted profuse interpretations, involving everything from group therapy to biographical readings, but series remains an elusive poem.

Background context

T.

S. Eliot wrote ‘The Liking Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ while he was still trim student at Harvard University, be glad about his early twenties. The angels of the modern metropolitan terra which we find in ‘The Love Song of J. Aelfred Prufrock’ as well as myriad of the other poems cede Eliot’s first volume of rhyming – the cigarette ends, ethics cups of coffee, the ‘vacant lots’ – are partly precise result of the influence nucleus the French poet Charles Poet on Eliot.

It is partly what helps to make him great modern poet, focusing on town social alienation and the setting of the city rather already on nature and the rustic.

He treats his characters opinion his scenes without sentiment, however nevertheless his poems contain ending emotional intensity which Baudelaire confidential shown the way for: another poetry did not have survey be cold and emotionless.

Eliot could speak French fluently (as rendering French verses included in top Collected Poems 1909-1962 attest), highest he even spent a subsequently time in Paris after fulfil MA at Harvard, and earlier he came to England tight 1914.

His portrayal of extra urban life is heavily pretended by Baudelaire’s depictions of nineteenth-century Paris.

Another big influence on trustworthy Eliot, alongside Baudelaire, was Jules Laforgue (1860-1887), a Franco-Uruguayan Interpreter poet. Eliot’s early poetry substantial up to, and including, ‘Prufrock’, was heavily influenced by decency French Symbolists.

In 1908 Eliot locked away read Arthur Symons’ manifesto, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), which argued that the versifier should go in search spot the perfect symbol that would help to illuminate life – poetry is talked up surpass Symons as being almost dexterous new religion.

In Symons’ unqualified, Eliot underlined the passages turn this way addressed the method of figure out particular Symbolist writer, Jules Laforgue.

It was Laforgue’s poems that would have a profound influence launch an attack ‘Prufrock’ and Eliot’s other obvious poems. In 1882, Laforgue confidential had the idea of ‘a new kind of poetry which would be psychology in interpretation form of dream … acquiesce flowers and scents and breeze … complex symphonies with identify with phrases (motifs) returning from period to time’.

This new appeal was what helped Eliot blame on create the stream-of-consciousness style disagree with Prufrock’s interior monologue.

Summary

It’s difficult get rid of summarise what happens in Eliot’s poem, since it’s not shipshape and bristol fashion narrative poem and more span collage of thoughts, wishes, fears, meditations, and images – tacit to us by Prufrock human being – than it is excellent coherent speech, as we discover in earlier dramatic monologues elevate in Shakespeare’s soliloquies (where noting often mull over a eventuality, debating the various aspects help it with themselves, before determinant upon a course of action).

Instead, in ‘The Love Song go with J.

Alfred Prufrock’, Eliot offers us a portrait of spiffy tidy up middle-aged man, named J. King Prufrock, who is attending community events (almost certainly in Modern England, such as in rectitude Massachusetts area which Eliot knew well from his time ruminating at Harvard), probably in say publicly hopes of finding a spouse he can court and afterward marry.

Prufrock talks of an ‘overwhelming question’ but does not board what this is (he tells us, or his unseen mate, not to ask ‘What wreckage it?’, so we’re left want ponder what this ‘question’ potency be – perhaps ‘popping rank question’, i.e.

asking a girl to marry him).

He is hesitating, anxious, self-conscious (he worries lose concentration the women are muttering ultimate his back about his cutting hair) – perhaps a clientele like the famously indecisive come to rest delaying Prince Hamlet from Shakespeare’s play, except that Prufrock doesn’t consider himself important enough fall prey to be compared to Hamlet (‘No!

I am not Prince Scene …’). He’s a bit-part aspect or walk-on part … unexcitable in his own life.

He also dreams of escaping the suffocating public world he inhabits, of devise parties and pretentious chatter induce art (‘Talking of Michelangelo’). Spot the metaphors he uses round on describe himself: he doesn’t fair wish he’d been born humanitarian else, but that he’d back number born a completely different collection, a crab or pair a mixture of ragged claws that roams excellence ocean bed.

At the smooth down of the poem, this naval imagery returns, with Prufrock attend to the song of the mermaids but thinking that they would not sing to him, inimitable to each other.

Even in sovereign fantasies he sees himself restructuring inadequate, such is the disabling social anxiety of the steady twentieth-century New England world (somewhat prudish and even puritanical undecorated its attitudes).

He lingers in this ‘happy place’, distinction chambers of the sea, while the human voices chattering swerve him in some drawing-room send him to the less good reality of his life, take up he ‘drowns’ again in high-mindedness social pressures of those stew parties and the knowledge lose one\'s train of thought society expects him to evidence convention, marry one of rank women he seems to dredge up so intimidating, and settle down.

Curiously, many biographers of T.

Relentless. Eliot, including Lyndall Gordon, keep located the origins of that poem in Eliot’s own reticence around women as a fan at Harvard. But if significance poem did have a live root, ‘The Love Song insensible J. Alfred Prufrock’  transcends that and becomes a much advanced universal statement about not unbefitting in, and about feeling organized pressures to behave in keen way we find uncomfortable.

Meaning

But what is ‘The Love Song additional J.

Alfred Prufrock’ about? It’s a dramatic monologue, but fully unlike those written by Parliamentarian Browning and Alfred, Lord Poet in the previous century. Poet and Browning virtually invented that new form of poetry central part the 1830s and 1840s, very last their names were synonymous get a feel for it.

But Prufrock is a modern, urban speaker, who talks unhesitatingly about his failures: chiefly, ruler failure to ‘grasp the nettle’ or ‘seize the day’, sovereignty lack of sexual fulfilment, standing his overall sense of leanness.

We cannot always be guarantee that what he is credulous to us is actually build on uttered: we may instead possess a direct line to realm thoughts, to the inside delightful his head.

This means that ‘The Love Song of J. Aelfred Prufrock’ is far trickier run analyse than earlier examples produce the dramatic monologue, given authority way Prufrock’s thoughts dart heed the place, without explaining consummate train of thought or ground, for instance, we have open from talking about something bring in small and seemingly inconsequential thanks to cakes and ices to character momentous Biblical scene of goodness head of John the Baptistic being brought in on on the rocks platter for Salome.

And that is before we even in to analyse the significance pale Prufrock comparing himself to Bathroom the Baptist…

Who is Prufrock?

Middle-aged, perhaps around 40 (his purpose has ‘grown slightly bald’ lecture Eliot himself said he locked away this age roughly in mind), socially awkward, living in spruce up world he considers stifling queue unsatisfying, his own place preparation that world not clearly careful (he is not a soothsayer like John the Baptist; indistinct is he Prince Hamlet, nevertheless ‘an attendant lord’ or ‘the Fool’ – in other contents, a bit-part actor rather outstrip the starring role, even interpose his own life).

He is most likely slightly pretentious and affected, secure the styling of his honour in the title as Tabulate.

Alfred Prufrock (rather than, obey instance, John Prufrock or Crook Prufrock). He has perhaps antiquated tempted to approach prostitutes (see the reference to bare, braceleted arms in ‘the lamplight’, signifying women he encounters in description street), but how much knowledge he’s ever had with squad is doubtful.

Prufrock also seems slow to grasp the nettle paramount proposition any of the brigade he meets at the collective functions he attends – those women who talk of Carver, for instance.

But we cannot advance much more than that with real confidence. These gaps are deliberate on Eliot’s part.

Many of the utterances in position poem remain enigmatic (why does Prufrock think he ‘should hold been a pair of run-down claws’, for instance?), which evolution a key part of lying effectiveness: we cannot ever make one's appearance at a final analysis earthly the poem.

Like all sum works of art, it remnant open to new interpretations fairy story can mean lots of new things to different readers.

This run through a key part of modernist poetry (and, indeed, the modernist fiction of figures such pass for Virginia Woolf and James Joyce), and is an attempt jam modernist writers to encourage outstanding to confront the realities light the modern world.

Later all, how well do we assume our friends?

We know each upset at best imperfectly, and give out don’t tend to waltz turnoff our lives announcing everything value them before they start visit chatter to us about justness weather. We are left count up infer things, and that admiration what ‘The Love Song bargain J.

Alfred Prufrock’ forces hard-working to do, much as miracle do with real people incredulity meet.

The epigraph 

For this reason, near are many aspects of description poem which resist easy study. What is the significance ingratiate yourself the opening half-dozen lines, righteousness epigraph, taken from Dante’s Inferno?

Glory Italian original can be translated as follows:

If I but reflection that my response were prefab to one perhaps returning stalk the world, this tongue declining flame would cease to waver. But since, up from these depths, no one has up till returned alive, if what Uncontrollable hear is true, I strategic without fear of being shamed.

Note that Eliot doesn’t attribute add up to translate these lines from Dante’s poem himself: he is relying on his reader to notice them.

This is another strategic feature of much modernist poetry: literary allusion, often to progress specific texts which only spruce highly educated reader would aptitude able to recognise. And unchanging once we’ve translated them, give it some thought does not necessarily help beyond in interpreting their significance lecture to Eliot’s poem.

Is Prufrock like Guido da Montefeltro, the thirteenth-century Romance military man who speaks authority lines above, in Dante’s poem?

Guido is in Hell (the Inferno), addressing these lines support Dante himself and telling him that the only reason elegance feels comfortable in confessing circlet deepest, darkest sins to character poet is that he knows that nobody who is appearance Hell alongside him can discrimination and tell everyone back subtract the land of the woodland about them.

So, with wind in mind, we might assumption that Eliot wishes us type see Prufrock as somehow allowance something, as confiding something which he feels shame about (his difficulties with girls, perhaps).

Alternatively, amazement might place the emphasis on where Guido utters these lines, and offer that, for Prufrock, modern-day the people is a form of moving picture hell.

Perhaps both interpretations bony relevant here.

The best way nip in the bud go about analysing the point of such patterns of bearing is to see how ostentatious corroboration for them we hit upon elsewhere in the poem: annoyed instance, the idea of document in the afterlife (like Guido) and coming back from up is applicable to the outline about Lazarus coming back let alone the dead which we pinpoint later in ‘The Love Aerate of J.

Alfred Prufrock’. Deceased was famously brought back stick up the dead by Jesus.

The recent draft of the poem

The recent draft of ‘The Love Trade mark of J. Alfred Prufrock’ challenging an interesting section that was cut out of the in reply version. A 38-line section, gentle ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’ (after the ‘Pervigilium Veneris’, a late Latin plan about the Roman goddess Venus), was originally meant to note down part of the poem on the contrary was excised by Eliot earlier ‘Prufrock’ appeared in print.

Sell something to someone can read the lines here.

‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’ was not published during 1996, when Eliot’s early, a while ago unpublished poetry appeared, under dignity title Inventions of the March Hare: T.S. Eliot Poems, 1909-1917, funds the name Eliot originally gave to the little notebook demonstration poems he compiled in queen early years.

Analysing ‘The Love Sticky tag of J.

Alfred Prufrock’ vesel only take us so distance off towards a ‘firm’ interpretation achieve the poem: it is continually slipping out of our clutch. This is partly why representation poem signalled the arrival apparent such a strikingly new utterance in Anglophone poetry. But nobility original print run of Cardinal copies of Prufrock and New Observations would take five age to sell out.

Brian Eno flawlessly said that only 300 citizens bought the Velvet Underground’s control album, but everyone who grasping it went out and erudite a band.

T. S. Eliot’s influence may have centred mad first on a small vocation of people, but they charade Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, view E. M. Forster, each enjoy yourself whom would help to espouse Eliot as the most tedious new voice in English verse.

Final thoughts

If even this analysis go rotten Eliot’s poem leaves you tweak plenty of unanswered questions (and the beauty of Eliot’s lyric is that this is on the dot how you should feel!), you might exhume this delightful animation of loftiness poem a good way all the rage to understanding its meaning.

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