24 pages • 48 minutes read
T. S. EliotThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Written by one of the most prominent figures of modernism, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” defined the early movement. Characterized by a break with previous generations’ romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, modernist poetry often made use of free verse, collage, dense cultural allusions, vernacular language, and other experimental poetic elements. Emerging in the wake of World War I with the onslaught of new technologies and modes of communication, modernism often espoused a profoundly negative or pessimistic view of the contemporary world, rejecting the notion of a stable, loving, or ordered world in favor of something depersonalized and amoral with unstable values and a lack of human connection.
Eliot believed that no poet could escape the influence of past writers and artists—an idea he explicates further in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). With “Prufrock,” Eliot situates his poem in a long literary tradition, stretching from the Bible to Dante—who he invokes from the beginning of the poem—to Shakespeare, and to Robert Browning, who also wrote a great deal of dramatic monologues. The richness of reference and allusion establishes not only Eliot’s connection with English literary tradition, but sets the stage for him to break with it, creating a poem that was unlike anything that had come before.
“Prufrock” serves as the quintessential modernist poem in its presentation of the fractured self as alienated from the modern world, in its despair and loneliness, and in its shifting—sometimes confusing—diction and imagery. Eliot and other modernist writers would go on to further explicate these themes in the years following “Prufrock’s” publication.
Historical Context
Many scholars note parallels between Eliot’s life and that of Prufrock, despite the age difference (Eliot was in his early twenties while writing the poem; Prufrock is a middle-aged man). Eliot wrote the poem during his college years; his ability to occupy the consciousness of an older character suggests a certain universality to the anxieties and concerns he presents. “Prufrock” serves as a jumping off point both for Eliot’s later work and for the modernist movement at large.
Eliot’s friendship with Ezra Pound, formed in these early years, proved consequential for literary modernism; Pound was crucial in ensuring “Prufrock’s” publication. In subsequent decades, both poets became titans of the movement, and Pound served as Eliot’s editor for many more years, most notably during the revision process for “The Waste Land.”
Although Eliot composed “Prufrock” in the years before World War I, the concerns it introduces became more and more prominent in the works of other post-war modernist writers like Pound and Yeats, and in Eliot’s later work. The modern world of Europe, with its changing urban landscape, technological advances, and rise in violence, forced a reckoning with previous frameworks that humans had used to find meaning. Some modernist works, like Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” criticize a Judeo-Christian framework as inadequate in the face of such enormous social upheaval. Eliot, who later converted to Anglicanism, would maintain a different, more hopeful interpretation of modern Christianity.
Related Titles
By T. S. Eliot
