T.S. Eliot

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
 * Differs from Romantics in that he places more importance on the poetry and medium rather than the poet
 * Like Keats (Romantic)
 * Keats becomes the emotion, the nightingale
 * Loses self in poem
 * Annihilate self – ELIOT
 * Modernist movement (& Victorians)
 * Sense of loss
 * World fragmented
 * Meaning hard to come by
 * New Criticism
 * Greater interest and focus on the text itself
 * Text entity within itself
 * Author, historical context unimportant
 * Emphasis on images
 * Important in Prufrock
 * Sought to make poetry more subtle, precise
 * Wanted wit, illusiveness, irony
 * Believed that poet’s mind is only catalyst, in contrast to Wordsworth
 * Eliot’s Use of Concrete Images
 * Evoke emotion through use of imagery rather than telling emotion
 * Subtlety
 * Images as a medium for the exploration of emotion
 * Dramatic monologue
 * Prufrock’s crisis is not simply his personal crisis, but crisis of the modern world
 * Prufrock as modern world
 * “When the evening is spread out against the sky,/ Like a patient etherised upon a table”
 * Person numb to anything
 * World etherised
 * Stuck in indecision
 * See what’s happening but asking “why?”
 * Existential crisis
 * Not being dead, but in a half-life, halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness
 * Modern world = chaos
 * Etherised, passive to whatever happens
 * “Muttering”
 * Inability to communicate
 * Gray
 * “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels”
 * Restlessness
 * “Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent/ To lead you to an overwhelming question…”
 * Streets to nowhere
 * Questions with no answers
 * Lines 15-16 “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-pane/ The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes”
 * Cats aimless, uncaring
 * Yellow smoke = sulphorous, jaundiced, diseased, nucleic, miasma
 * Lines 73 & 74
 * Crabs scuttle, move creepily, CLAWS – part of the whole