"THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK" AS TEENAGED WASTELAND
As
3G
2 - 01$
*-
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A thesis submitted to the faculty of
San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment of
the requirements for
the Degree
3^3
Master of Arts
In
English Literature
by
Margaret Sarah Snyder
San Francisco, California
May 2015
Copyright by
Margaret Sarah Snyder
2015
CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read "The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock" as Teenaged Wasteland
by Margaret Sarah Snyder, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for
approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree
Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.
Sara Hackenberg,
Associate Professor
"THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK" AS TEENAGED WASTELAND
Margaret Sarah Snyder
San Francisco, California
2015
Though the large body of criticism on T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
reads the titular narrator as a middle-aged man, I would like to join the critical discourse
to offer an alternate reading: that Prufrock is a teenager. I argue that Prufrock as a
teenaged persona provides Eliot with a decidedly modern mechanism for an allencompassing sensibility and strikes much greater consonance with both Eliot’s criticism
and poetics, as well as, explicating the continued presence of the poem in the high school
English classroom. I will outline Eliot’s early poetic development, focusing on adaptation
of Matthew Arnold’s Victorian Romantacism to the Modern world and his indoctrination
in the work of the French Symbolists Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire, who taught
Eliot that, “the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had
had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry” (To Criticize the
Critic, 126). With “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot therefore develops a
narrative for teenaged experience that became a blueprint for young adult male
experience; the afterlife of Eliot’s poem, which I will explore in British and American
rock, forms another key piece of its continued ability to still relate to the world over one
hundred years after its initial composition and publication.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.
Date
PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to take a brief opportunity to express my endless gratitude to Professor Sara
Hackenberg for both her engaging teaching and creative coursework at San Francisco
State University and her generous guidance and encouragement with this thesis project. I
will remain forever indebted to her challenging intellect and passion for her subject
matter. I would also like to thank Professor Meg Schoerke for all of her patience and her
insightful course on metaphors. Finally, I would like to thank Jan Lamborn and other
members of the Graduate Studies Department and College of Extended Learning who
made the completion of this project possible. I could not have completed this paper
without the invaluable assistance of the Faculty and Staff of San Francisco State and the
experience has been arduous and rewarding. I will be proud to display my San Francisco
State diploma and will always remember the support and kindness of those who helped
me make a dream come true despite all the challenges and delays. Thank you.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as Teenaged Wasteland...........................................1
I.
Introductory Remarks....................................................................................... 1
II.
Eliot’s Studies in Poetics and Consciousness................................................ 7
III.
Prufrock the Teenager.................................................................................... 23
IV.
Eliot as Victorian Child Coming of Age.......................................................35
V.
The Song of Powerless Prufrock................................................................... 60
VI.
Publication and Reception: Contextual Atmosphere................................. 78
VII.
Prufrock’s Afterlife as a Blueprint for TeenageFailure...............................86
Works Cited..............................................................................................................................95
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1
“THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” AS TEENAGED WASTELAND
I.
Introductory Remarks
“Don’t cry
Don’t raise your eyes
It’s only teenaged wasteland” (The Who).
The large body o f criticism on “The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock”1 focuses on Prufrock as the
character o f the modern man. Roger Mitchell provides one such reading:
J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker o f one of Eliot's poems. He is the Representative
Man o f early M odernism.” Mitchell continues to summarize this pervasive interpretation,
elaborating this Man as “shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded (many have said
impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of solipsism (42).
While such readings provide a specific access point to the poem, in this thesis I will join the critical
conversation to develop an alternative perspective on the narrative persona o f Prufrock. In this paper I will
argue that Prufrock is not, in fact, a middle-aged man, but rather a teenager overwhelmed with the horrific
apprehension o f how he will grow old in a world in which he is not sure he belongs.
The reason I think it is significant to assert this reading is two-fold. First, reading Prufrock as a
teenager finds much more consonance with Eliot’s own critical writings and poetic development. Second,
with “Prufrock,” Eliot develops a template for speaking to urban, adolescent male experience that has since
been replicated through time as a powerful cultural tool for registering the angst, frustration and ennui
considered endemic o f modern experience. The afterlife o f “Prufrock” exists on the one level through
1 To clarify, I will refer to Eliot’s poem as “Prufrock” and the poem’s narrator as Prufrock throughout the
remainder o f this paper.
2
continued presence in literary studies, as discussed by educator Derek Soles in his article on teaching
“Prufrock” to high school students. As Soles notes, the poem “often appears in literature anthologies
designed for use in high school and college English classes,” which has contributed over time to its status
as a “modern classic” (59). On another level, the poem still makes sense to present day readers due to their
familiarity, even if on a subconscious level, with the continuous reincarnation o f the “Prufrock” blueprint in
expressions o f teenaged, male experience. As Eliot’s poem is itself a love song, I want to look to British
and American music, especially rock music, to illustrate this blueprint phenomenon. Ultimately, my
reading provides powerful insights into Eliot’s writing process, his poetic development, and the poem’s
continuing afterlife.
The underlying question inciting this paper was my own personal response to the poem. For, why
did "Prufrock” resonate with me as a high school student, if it were simply the ramblings o f an
apprehensive middle-aged man? When I first read “Prufrock” as a fourteen year-old, I recall being struck by
the directness o f Prufrock’s voice, as if he were talking to me; in addition, unlike previous poems I had
read, I knew how the narrator felt, especially the part about the eyes pinning you to the wall or wanting to
just be crab legs. I thought Prufrock understood my high school anxieties, social unease and the sensation
o f wasting time, and it did not occur at all to me that he might be a middle-aged man. Since as a teenager,
my original interaction with the poem was one o f alignment and connection to the narrative voice, the
assumption o f Prufrock as middle-aged never quite sat right with me. In his essay on teaching “Prufrock” to
high school students, Soles notes, “in some ways it is a strange choice for inclusion in young adult
curriculum since it concerns the insecurities of a middle-aged man” (59). Soles does not take this
observation further than thinking it odd. I think because “Prufrock” speaks to young adult experience that is
exactly why it is so often taught in high school curriculum.
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In all my research, I encountered only one reading that vaguely hinted at the narrator o f “Prufrock”
being a young adult. In a minor aside during critic Jackson J. Benson’s discussion of Quentin Compson as a
self-portrait o f a young William Faulkner, Benson mentions that “such contemporaries as Joyce, Pound,
Eliot, and H em ingw ay.... produced protagonists with whom they identified, yet viewed with a certain
ironic detachment — self caricatures, as it were — but the young protagonist with all his faults is portrayed
as less guilty in each case than the culture which surrounds him ” (145). While this statement does not
identify the Eliotic protagonist as Prufrock, previously Benson finds Faulkner’s self-portrait Quentin to be
“reminiscent” o f Prufrock, as the names o f both narrators suggest “a certain self-mockery by the author”
(145). While this indirect connection offers a promising glimpse at a potential interpretation in support of
my argument, Benson’s discussion of Faulkner’s self-portrait veers into the category o f a blatantly
biographical reading hinged disappointingly on a collapse o f author and narrator.
Attempting to delve into the psychological state or the personality o f Eliot in any productive way
is like trying to solve a one hundred year old crime with no physical evidence except some letters and
essays. What we do find in Eliot’s letters and essays is a poet and a critic obsessed with developing a
distinct poetics. This is what I will attune my research to. I will not seek to find Eliot the person, but instead
seek out Eliot the poet to unravel how he is telling a story and what this story might be. By focusing on the
narrator as a persona, as a performance of a particular type o f engagement with the world, we can think of
Eliot as operating on an authorial level, willfully constructing a narrative persona and the drama
surrounding him. As Eliot reiterates, “the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium”
(“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 42). Thus, I do not read Prufrock as a teenager out of biographical
speculation that he might be a thinly veiled self-portrait of Eliot, but rather, I offer that we approach
Prufrock the persona as a teenager, as a poetic mechanism to capable o f consuming all experience and
mediating meaning to the reader.
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In order to substantiate an interpretation o f Prufrock as a teenager, I will identify important
elements o f larger cultural context and Eliot’s own early poetic development and later critical writings that
give credence to this reading. By utilizing the John Savage’s research in The Prehistory o f the American
Youth Culture: 1875-1945, 1 will cover the specific demographic shifts from Eliot’s birth in 1888, until the
poem ’s publication in 1917, that led to a rising subculture of urban American and European teenagers. With
this sense o f cultural movement in mind, I will chart Eliot’s development o f a poetic voice in his young
adult years. Eliot’s discovery o f the late nineteenth-century “dramatically young and urban poets,” Charles
Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue, catalyze Eliot’s development of a specific voice (Hannoosh, 345). Another
important aspect o f Eliot’s early poetic metamorphosis can best be observed through a comparison between
Eliot’s work with that o f Victorian poet Matthew Arnold; I will show how Eliot remains in conversation
with his contemporaneous poetic heritage of the Victorians and Romantics and he engages mainstream
poetic trends in order to register his difference and develop something new.
Looking at the publication and the reception of "Prufrock" provides an invaluable lens into the
way readers initially approached Eliot as a young rebel and a further reason why I read the poem as about
the experiences o f a teenager. As Eliot writes,
From Baudelaire I learned first, a precedent for the political possibilities, never developed
in any poet writing in my own language, o f the more sordid aspects o f the modern
metropolis, o f the possibility of the fusion between the sordidly realist and the
phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition o f the matter-of-fact and the fantastic.
From him, as Laforgue, I learned that the sort of material that I had, the sort o f experience
that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for
poetry; and that the source o f new poetry might be found in what had been regarded
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hitherto as the impossible, the sterile, the intractably unpoetic into poetry {To Criticize
the Critic, 126).
While writing “Prufrock” in 1910, Eliot is exploring this concept that the material for “new poetry” lies in
“the im possible...the intractably unpoetic;” and by tracing the contours o f adolescent modern experience
through his persona o f Prufrock he develops a narrative that still translates today as a pattern for teenaged
expression (126).
I follow critic Peter Nicholls to emphasize the poetics o f Modernism. This means thinking of
Modern poetry the same way definitive Modernist writers and critics, such as Ezra Pound and Eliot did, in
the terms o f poetics as “the event o f making” (54). This poetic event o f setting words in motion to perform
and dramatize the making o f meaning through unexpected combinations forming at the “hazy borderline” of
consciousness forms the theoretical backbone of Eliot’s modern poetics (54). Ultimately, for Eliot to be
modernizing is to be evolving, to be aligning one’s poetics with the complexity of modernizing culture
through providing a cultural narrative that can contain both continuity and change; as Nicholls points out,
for Eliot this “otherness that shadows poetic expression is at once the force o f the new ...a n d the voice of
tradition” (55). Eliot develops the tradition of teenaged expression he finds so compelling in the works of
the French Symbolists with the established poetic techniques o f the Metaphysical poets, such as
juxtaposition and objective correlative, into a praxis of form and content: Prufrock, the modern teenaged
persona as a mechanism for all-encompassing sensibility.
Defining and chronologically delineating Modernity is a nearly impossible task. In regards to
poetry, it is usually understood as an epoch marked as roughly starting in the early 1910s, when Eliot writes
"Prufrock" (Blair, 885). Modernity is a highly contested space and in this paper I utilize the work of
Timothy Mitchell in order to read Modernity as a particular idea o f time performed upon the stage of
history, built upon “the assumption of shared spatio-temporal experience;” for, the borders o f eras emerge
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not sharply but slowly through an increasing understanding o f shared experience or sensibility (15).
Significantly, the word “m odern” as an adjective describes “being in existence at this time; current, present,”
which indicates that to be modern definitively means being in conversation or connection with the present
{Oxford English Dictionary). Thus to be modern is to engage with the present. This engagement involves a
collective cultural agreement on what that present might be. Mitchell characterizes Modern sensibility as
“shaped by this investment in representation of self as the most authentic glimpse into the experience of
observing the actual world" and further argues that for Modern consciousness "a disembodied observer is
the natural state o f engagement in the world” (20). "Prufrock" speaks to these investments and
performances o f self, which I characterize as fugitive identity; that is to say, conceiving o f our own identity
as performing an escape from ourselves, or hiding from our self, through these notions o f disembodied
observation and socially-constructed self.
World War I also plays a significant role in shaping masculine experience and cultural perception
o f gender identity during the poem's publication in the late 1910s. As Anthony Fletcher's research on the
impact o f the War on cultural concepts o f masculinity suggests, emergent trends o f the male as patient, and
apprehension o f wasted youth and overall cultural uncertainty resonate with Prufrock's modern teenaged
wasteland. As Baudelaire conceives it, "Modernity is transient, the fleeting, the contingent, it is one half art,
the other half being the eternal and immovable” ("The Painter of Modern Life"). Thus, teenage identity as a
cultural concept is contingent upon Modernity. Since the teenager represents a transient temporal space
between youth and adulthood, the teenager therefore emerges as the most Modern of subject matters and
speaking voices. Eliot develops the French Symbolist precursor o f speaking to teenaged urban experience
and connects directly to the present through elevating this voice into an all-encompassing modern
sensibility.
Another way o f approaching this concept is through Eliot’s discussion in his essay “Music of
Poetry”; for Eliot, “poetry has to be in such a relation to the speech of the time that the listener or reader can
7
say ‘that is how I should talk if I could talk in poetry’” (23-24). Eliot continues, explicating that the reason
why “the best contemporary poetry” can be exciting and fulfilling lies in commonality with contemporary
speech and music, and drawing the reader into conversation with the verse (24). Thus, “Prufrock” is modern
not just in choice o f persona, but also in the style of diction and the lilt of the verse, Prufrock speaks to the
reader in the common language o f the time, inviting the reader to connect with his emerging Modern
experience. Thus, the adolescent identity of the narrator and Eliot's narrative style of connecting to the
common speech and music o f current surroundings, provide the direction for my study o f the poem’s
afterlife.
Just as “Prufrock” attests to be a song, the afterlife o f the poem as narrative pattern can be vividly
observed in British and American rock songs that speak to teenaged male experience in the modern world.
We will see that “Prufrock” is less o f an artifact o f a by-gone epoch, than an evolution o f style, sensibility
and speaking voice that continues to echo across time through music. By tracing Eliot’s poetic
development, engaging in a close reading o f the poem and evaluating the poem's reception at the time of
publication, I will culturally place “Prufrock” among the best teenaged rock songs, rather than simply leave
the poem malingering in a dusty old book. In the end, I hope the reader o f this paper can then return to
“Prufrock” as if for the first time, to think of it outside of the textbook, as a work o f art that speaks to issues
at the forefront o f consciousness in a modern teenaged wasteland.
II.
Eliot’s Studies in Poetics and Consciousness
“Gonna get my Ph.D./
I'm a teenage lobotomy” (The Ramones, “Teenage Lobotomy”).
In this section, I will highlight a few decisive moments in Eliot’s education, readerly development
and early poetry that evolve into “Prufrock”. In the timeline set out by A. David Moody in his authoritative
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biography, in the year o f 1905 Eliot first shared his poetry with others during high school at the age of
seventeen, in the form o f a verse with a clunky title “If Time and Space, as Sages Say” (15). Biographer
Peter Ackroyd characterizes Eliot’s earliest poetry as full o f a “preoccupation with the passage of tim e” and
relying heavily upon the utilization o f Romantic images o f nature in a state of decay or dying: as Moody
anecdotally remarks, “the flowers are forever withering” (Ackroyd, 32 and Moody, 17). Moody sees these
very early poems as “faintly evoke[ing] the poetic effects” of Romantics and Victorians including
“Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, o f Tennyson, [and] Arnold” (17). I will explore the relationship between Eliot
and these immediate predecessors, Matthew Arnold in particular, in greater detail later in this paper, but for
now, please note that we understand young Eliot to be well versed in Romantic and Victorian poetry and
even writing in these styles.
So, if Eliot’s earliest poetry is “acutely aware o f waste, the emptiness of passing days, o f the need
to use tim e,” not surprisingly so is he: graduating high school in three years and immediately beginning
studies at Harvard in 1906 (Ackroyd, 31-32). Then, in December of 1908, as biographer Ronald Bush
emphasizes, “a book Eliot found in the Harvard Union library changed his life: Arthur Symons's The
Symbolist M ovement in Literature ’ (Bush). Moody reiterates this notion o f Eliot’s encounter with the
French Symbolists as a turning point, observing “the effect o f his reading Laforgue was that he was
galvanized into being him self’ (18). Eliot also evolved his poetic voice through reading another French
Symbolist featured in Arthur Symon’s collection: Baudelaire. To recall the quote in my introduction,
Baudelaire shows Eliot “that the sort o f material that I had... an adolescent... in an industrial city in
America, could be... the source o f new p oetry...” (128). Thus, if in 1908, Eliot realized that he could use
his actual surroundings and experience as substance for poetry, then what better way to generate more
9
source material than for the young Eliot to travel to France? Which is o f course exactly what he did
(Moody, 18).
After a slight delay due to a scarlet fever scare, a setback that perhaps became a gift in disguise, as
the patient metaphor is crucial to "Prufrock,” Eliot undertook a postgraduate year in Paris in 1910 at the
Sorbonne (Bush). Not only did Eliot complete Prufrock between 1910 and 1911, he also completed all the
poems that were published later in his first collection: "The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of
a Lady," "La Figlia Che Piange," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody on a Windy N ight” (Bush). Critic Stanley
Sultan utilizes Eliot’s own epistolary account to clarify the history o f "Prufrock;" the poem “ was conceived
some time in 1910’” and then Eliot took “‘several fragments which were ultimately embodied in the poem’”
with him from Harvard to the Sorbonne, finishing the work during a visit to Munich in “‘the summer of
1911’” (Eliot, as qtd. in Sultan, 78). Eliot therefore would have been twenty-two turning twenty-three while
composing "Prufrock," a fact which Sultan finds remarkable, exclaiming how miraculous, that while Yeats
continues to pound away at “high romanticism,” that the young Eliot createf this piece o f innovative,
"inchoate Modernism" (78).
As Sultan extols o f Eliot, “a graduate student barely into his twenties evolved for and embodied in
a poem: focus on the process o f consciousness; a formal strategy identifying the subject with the
expression o f that subject” (78). Sultan’s reading veers dangerously towards a focus on the originality and
individual talent o f Eliot, speaking o f the poem as if it was a meteoric miracle against a dreary horizon of
exhausted Romanticism: the first shot from Eliot’s canon of genius that forever changed the direction of
poetry (77-90). However, Eliot him self would eschew this type o f reading. As Eliot later asserts in his 1928
"Introduction" to Ezra Pound’s collected verse, “true originality is merely development; and if it is right
development it may appear in the end so inevitable that we almost come to a point o f view of denying all
‘original’ virtue to the poet. He simply did the next thing” (9-10). Along these lines, Eliot’s own readerly
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trajectory directly informs the development of his verse as he branched out to read emerging alternate
voices in poetry. As Eliot’s biographers emphasize, the poet developed the next thing in his own verse
through his engagement with the French Symbolists.
Ackroyd observes that in encountering Laforgue, Eliot was changed utterly by “recognizing
him self through someone else;” thus, development emerges first as an expression o f identification, and then
through conversation with the past about how to move forward, how to survive and make sense of a
changing world (34). Eliot describes his voice in his earliest poetry as “directly drawn from the study of
Laforgue,” for Eliot became “engrossed in working out the implications of Laforgue” (qtd. by Schuchard,
214). Critic Ronald Schuchard suggests that rather than just seeking to adapt the rhythmic patterns and
dramatic situations o f Laforgue, what Eliot intends by the word “implications” is the “thematic-symbolic”
consequences (214). These “implications,” are thus two-fold; for on the poetic landscape, the French
Symbolist movement represents and provides an alternative to Victorianism and Romanticism, and on a
personal level, Laforgue expands Eliot’s awareness o f what poetry could be, giving him new horizons to
apply his sensibility (214). Thus, the late nineteenth-century works o f Baudelaire and Laforgue give Eliot a
template to express his frustrated youth, philosophical wanderings and urban experience through the poetic
persona o f the urban voyeur and young flaneur (Ackroyd, 33-34). As Hannoosh reiterates, these poets
taught “Eliot how to speak the language o f teenaged visionary experience” (345).
Yet, what exactly is this “teenaged visionary experience”? (Hannoosh, 345). Hannoosh’s phrase
first suggests a means o f registering difference through the rejection o f the previous generation’s vision of
Romantic apprehension o f Nature and experience o f enlightenment; ultimately vision is something as
simple as seeing differently. In order to tease out what these new ways of seeing through poetry might be,
let us explore Eliot’s early poetry to see how his voice develops through engagement with the example of
the French Symbolists. Bush elaborates on the impact: “Laforgue's combination o f ironic elegance and
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psychological nuance gave his juvenile literary efforts a voice” (Bush). Schuchard’s essay suggests that we
can best see the emergence o f Eliot’s personal voice through drawing out the way he engages and plays
with Laforgue and provides insight into the way Eliot emulates and modifies Laforgue. For, on one level
Eliot takes from Laforgue the anti-Romantic pattern of “ironically undercutting the explicit, implicit, or
expected sentimentalism o f a dramatic situation,” yet, as Schuchard elaborates, “he then turned the ironic
technique o f deflating the emotional sentimentalism in the poem against Laforgue by further mocking the
philosophical sentimentalism underlying Laforgue’s lunar symbolism” (214). Expanding Schuchard's
specific focus, we can deduce that reading Laforgue provided Eliot with even more material to subvert.
As Schuchard summarizes, in Laforgue characters seek to escape from the sordid urban world
through some enlightening inner reality o f divine metaphysical order, which the poet often portrays as a
personified female moon sometimes “explicitly addressed as the soul” (215). Schuchard points our attention
to how this “lunar lady” becomes “consistently mocked and debased” in Eliot; she and nocturnal rendezvous
o f moonlit introspection represent “the deluding Inner Light, of the Romantic, sentimental attitude toward
the nature o f Man and the Absolute” in Eliot’s early works (215). I find Schuchard’s minute analysis very
helpful as most criticism focuses on Eliot’s replication and adoration o f Laforgue, rather than on what Eliot
undermines, twists and shifts in his development towards something new. I will continue to follow
Schuchard’s specific focus to discuss the overall ways Eliot plays with Laforgue. Then I will address how
initially contrived irony, in poems such as Eliot’s 1909 "Conversation Galante," becomes transmuted into
Eliot’s personal voice in 1910 "Preludes" and "Spleen," and finally into "Prufrock."
Schuchard sees Eliot's "Conversation Galante" as “modeled roughly on the dramatic dialogue in
Laforgue’s 'Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot,' where the meditative male, who keeps ‘one eye intent upon
the Unconscious,’ talks to a threatening representative o f all womankind” (216). Eliot clearly takes
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Laforgue’s series o f events as a pattern: wherein a poem presents itself as a conversation or dialogue and a
female presence functions as a threat, the same formula he later expands in ’’Prufrock." While he recreates
the basic structure o f Laforgue in "Conversation Galante," Eliot ultimately undercuts any sense o f insight or
salvation, which an image o f some mysticized Absolute order could provide to a man stuck in a boring
conversation with an aggressive woman. Eliot even pushes to the point o f mocking the masculine persona
for trying to create any kind o f escape through poetic musings.
In "Conversation Galante," Eliot positions the female as he describes in his essay on Baudelaire,
where the woman functions as what divides man from spiritual or enlightened experience (Eliot,
“Baudelaire,” 381). Ironically, Eliot taunts the narrator for trying to have a spiritual or sexual experience,
really, for trying to do anything at all. Even before encountering all the Laforguean connections through
Schuchard’s analysis, my initial reading o f "Conversation Galante" focused on the pattern of undermining:
Eliot systematically replaces climactic universal insights and classical poetic tropes with a dead-end
moments o f conversation and mundane objects. For example, Eliot's narrator condescends to the “moon,” as
“our sentimental friend,” and replaces this lunar symbol with “an old battered lantern hung aloft;” by using
the visual connection as a slippery slope of metaphoric realization, he lowers the moon instead o f lifting the
world up to it (1 and 4).
The final effect thus emerges as a poem about spent symbols, over-played poetic objects and plots,
and a creeping sensation that cultural insistence upon these tropes only alludes to a fear of emptiness and
dried up creativity. While Eliot’s bold demonstration of actively displacing classic symbolic imagery with
modern imagery forms a more extreme pattern, he draws this conceit from Baudelaire’s more subtle use of
asserting modern world objects as new symbolism. As Eliot writes, “Baudelaire gave new possibilities to
poetry in a new stock o f imagery o f contemporary life;” yet, “not merely in the use o f imagery o f the sordid
life o f the great metropolis,” but through “the elevation of this imagery to stand for something much more
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than itself (“Baudelaire,” 377). Thus, in the case of "Conversation Galante," by comparing the moon to an
“old battered lantern,” Eliot implies that manufactured objects o f the modern world have replaced nature’s
function in real life, and, consequently, objects o f the modern world should replace nature as a meaningful
symbolic language in poetry (4). Furthermore, rather than providing some moment of beholding the beauty
o f Nature or some insight into cosmic grace, the lantern serves a practical purpose “to light poor travelers to
their distress” (5). By not providing a Romanticized insight, but instead highlighting impending danger or
struggle against the backdrop o f darkness, Eliot’s image offers neither destruction nor salvation, just one of
uncertain gravity and unknown ends.
This “distress” could thus just stem from traveling home to a desolate tenement apartment or it
could be a deadly threat lurking around the corner (5). Eliot’s new image speaks to both the failure of
Romanticism to provide authentic meaning to the modern world, but also to the uncertainty of modern
urban living: what we might see in the dark can no longer be Romanticized as the moon or portrayed, as by
the Symbolist, to be some ecstatic joy in drunken insight or moral depravity erased by the next dawn. Eliot
speaks to the extremes o f Baudelaire as showing “damnation in itself is an immediate form of salvation
from the ennui o f modern life, because it at last gave some significance to living” (378-379). Along these
lines, later in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," Schuchard observes Eliot portraying a “Laforgeuean lunar
traveler unmasked,” who cannot recall the vision of truth he had the night before (217-218). As Schuchard
points out, all this traveler remembers are “broken, twisted, artificial things,” and the smell o f dust and
cologne (218). Eliot’s early personas are incapable o f anything approximating damnation or salvation or
insight or catharsis, and the ironic detachment culminating into the end of the poem forms the only escape
from ennui. In Eliot’s early verse, we see him fine-tuning a sort o f irony that can envelop the extremes of
the Romantic and Symbolist vision into the shades of gray of experience: the hazy half-forgotten memories
o f miserable afternoons spent in frivolous, tedious company.
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Returning to "Conversation Galante," in trying to regain his female companion’s interest, the
narrator then references the sound o f someone banging away a weary nocturne meant to “explain / the night
and moonshine” which, he informs the lady, effectually gives form to “our own vacuity;” and I want to
pause here to breakdown the layers o f irony packed into such a deceptively simple line (8-10). First, if the
nocturne attempts to shed light upon some hidden corners of human experience, in doing so, it
compromises the complexity o f nighttime through asserting a cohesive, simplified and repeated
representation that could explain the darkness away. That some evocative chords could stand for the whole
experience o f nighttime is “inane” and anyone ludicrous enough to find this finished product meaningful
must be not thinking about it (12). The narrator sees the effect o f this music as not emotionally stirring, but
more fundamentally disturbing; for, this nocturne insists upon its own substance through alluding to a
romanticized experience so inflated and expansive it is in fact inauthentic and exhausted of meaning and
therefore empty.
Broadly mocking Romanticism as an art movement with his choice of the Nocturne, Eliot attests
to the mirage o f manufactured emotions masking the emptiness o f those, such as the woman in this poem
who are drawn to it. Eliot continues to develop this formula, as he elaborates this scene in a later work,
"Portrait o f a Lady," by adding even more blatant sexual discomfort through an implication o f Chopin as
representing female desire for foreplay. Eliot’s portrait o f this lady is more a mirror of a young man’s crisis:
she is narrated to us as a projection eliciting his fears that might otherwise remain exclusively his and
instead she exposes and threatens to dispossess him. In "Prufrock," "Portrait o f a Lady" and "Conversation
Galante," I read the narrator’s horror in the face of women as systemic o f a larger repulsion from a mindless
substitute o f an outdated, simplified Romantic aesthetic for artistic authenticity in a complex modern world.
For example, a genre such as the Nocturne does not raise questions of how human experience of nighttime
and the moon changed from say, when Chopin mastered the form in the 1830s, to when Eliot writes in the
1910s. Therefore, by clinging to comforting and rarified art, the consumer can distance themselves from
15
any intellectual necessity to account for the experience of rapid changes brought about through the advent
o f electricity, increasing urbanization, increased mobility and scientific discovery.
Eliot mocks this notion of art as unsullied by the exigencies of the modern world, showing it to be
empty and its assumed purity to be tainted by feminine desire for immediate gratification through easy
aesthetic pleasure. By gendering Romanticism and associating it with the worst stereotypical female
qualities, Eliot speaks to his feeling that this art as castrates creativity and functioning solely as a
commodity for titillating the bourgeoisie. Accordingly, in "Conversation Galante," the moonlight becomes
a sentimental ghost o f some meaningful past, so to now try and make it stand for something, or mean
anything in the present seems “inane” (12). After the narrator mocks the music, the woman inquires sharply
if he is implying she has bad taste in music and Eliot markedly splits from the narrative voice as he then
mocks the narrator who attempts to speak poetically to the woman despite his better judgment. The
narrator’s rational distaste o f her sentimental taste becomes subjugated to the demands of Romanticism,
which carries a complicit implication that Romanticism functions as a prelude to sex and that artistic
pleasure distracts from the lack o f intellectual fulfillment.
In the narrator’s lines calling the woman “the eternal enemy of the absolute,” he speaks as if under
a Laforguean spell, expressing how the distraction o f female flesh has pulled him away from his spiritual
quest (14). Schuchard reads the tone to be a double-prong of irony, seeing Eliot mock French Symbolism
for building up poetry as a quest for the Absolute and therefore failing to fully escape the trappings of
Romanticism (216). I would add that lines 7-18 also suggest that the female character functions solely as a
mechanism; the deeper metanarrative irony in "Conversation Galante" might therefore be that the narrator
and the characters and the scenes proposing reality are all ultimately exposed as poetic mechanisms. This
shocking possibility undercuts the intimacy o f French Symbolist and Romantic first-person subjectivity;
Moody concurs my apprehension: “Laforgue is never so objective [as Eliot]" (20). Moody offers that in
Eliot “the feat o f detachment is therefore all the more extraordinary, for somehow the poet has contrived to
16
stand outside his world without placing him self in the realm o f imaginary” (20). Eliot develops his voice
through presenting French Symbolist patterns and strategies yet remaining outside his poetry; I think this
grants him an ability to watch the poem work and calculate the effect for Eliot’s approach is ultimately
cerebral. Eventually, Eliot realizes the limitations of the extreme objectivism he practices in "Conversation
Galante" to develop a mechanism of an engaged first-person subjectivity as a hook in "Prufrock:" for Eliot
grants Prufrock the privilege o f mocking himself.
Thus, through Eliot’s reading and re-working of the French Symbolists he develops a voice by
drawing momentum from being in conversation with their work. While many critics, such as Joseph
Maddrey, simply note that Eliot translated Laforgue into English, Schuchard draws our attention to the way
Eliot actually subtly plays with and transforms the paradoxes of Symbolism. When Eliot’s mocks his own
narrator in "Conversation Galante" with the line “at a stroke our mad poetics to confute,” Eliot essentially
asks what can Symbolist poetry prove to be except another strain o f Romanticism that confuses Absolutes
for answers (17). So Eliot realizes he must push forward and seize upon French Symbolism as a movement
on the verge o f some great shift in poetry, on the verge o f Modernism. Eliot sees Baudelaire as “inventing]
a new kind o f Romantic nostalgia... a poetry of waiting rooms,” and I think young Eliot puts him self into
this narrative to speak to what actually lies in other rooms, rather than idealizing the moment o f rapture as a
place where some imagined, inexplicable insight or joy is awaiting (379). Thus, Eliot’s early verse tackles
the unfinished business o f Romanticism and French Symbolism.
As critic A.R. Jones describes, with the publication o f "Prufrock" in 1917, “English poetry was
dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century” (215). This apt metaphor conveys my sense
that Eliot’s voice seeks to push past poetics to speak to the present world in new ways. To explore this idea,
I will turn to another poem Eliot wrote and published during 1910, entitled "Spleen," which Sultan reads as
a clear precursor to "Prufrock" (82). The fact that Eliot began writing "Prufrock" one month later, initially
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invites examination o f "Spleen," and Sultan is not alone in his critical focus on this work, for as Moody
elaborates, “it is with 'Spleen' that Eliot begins to deal with his own world and to find his voice” (Sultan, 82
and Moody, 20). In homage to Baudelaire, the title is after "Spleen et Ideal;" and Eliot is using the French
sense of this word to signify “excessive dejection or depression o f spirits” (Moody, 20). Sultan asserts, “in it
["Spleen"] many early traces o f "Prufrock" can be seen including images o f urban world,” and “a
personified Life who is ‘bald,’ ‘fastidious and bland” speaking to “an ironic condescension to the futility of
life” (82). Returning to Schuchard’s in-depth analysis, "Spleen" more specifically tells the story o f “a
masquerade o f pious church-goers consciously going through their ritual social graces,” a sight that plunges
the speaker into “splenetic dejection” (Schuchard, 219). Schuchard also sees this personified “Life” which
the poem leaves abandons “anxiously ‘on the doorstep of the Absolute’” as anticipating Prufrock (219).
Schuchard reads this poem as expressing “an acute awareness o f spiritual torpor,” wherein this
personification waits for salvation with no clear notion o f how to open the door (219). I would add to this
reading that Eliot’s early poetry largely focuses on a methodology o f escape from social situations of empty
rituals and expired culture, so this personified Life finds him self trapped between a community in which he
finds no solace and an interiority from which there is no way out.
Neither Schuchard, Sultan or Moody directly address why Eliot shifted from the flat
personification in "Spleen" to the fleshed-out persona in "Prufrock," and this is precisely what I think I can
add to the discussion with my reading o f Prufrock as a teenager. For, while "Spleen" appears to be an early
attempt at some images o f "Prufrock," the shift from personified Life to first-person narrative indicates
Eliot’s purposeful development towards a more authentic speaking voice through a mind laid bare: Eliot's
poetry thus comes o f age through the persona o f a teenaged narrator. In "Spleen" Eliot tries out a
personified Life, and it fails to satisfy his poetic needs; the personification represents or alludes to modern
experience, but it does not speak directly to it. Eliot needs a decisively Modern persona to speak directly to
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the reader and what better choice than an adolescent in a city to mediate Modernity directly to the reader?
Eliot used a teeneaged persona to mainline Modern consciousness through the epicenter o f developing
present in a liminal temporal space between the past and the future, between youth and adulthood that
spoke to the future.
Eliot provides us a clue o f how to speak directly when he elaborates his discussion o f originality:
“the poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad; it is, in the bad sense, ‘subjective’ with no relation
to the world to which it appeals” (qtd. in Nicholls, 55). Crucially, the poem should appeal to the world; a
conceit Eliot manifests in the first lines of "Prufrock:" “Let us go then, you and I ...” (1). With these lines,
Eliot develops a dynamic speaking voice vibrating with simultaneous rejection and invitation o f the reader.
This style is antithetical to "Spleen," where the poet limits the reader’s involvement by directly positioning
the narrator as the you, such as the lines, “repetition that displaces / your mental self-possession / By this
unwarranted digression” (4-6). Thus, through purposefully transforming personification into a persona,
Eliot discovers poetic momentum by utilizing exposed and externalized subjectivity. In addition, through a
confusion o f intended addressee, Eliot breaks down the boundary between the poem's narrator and the
reader, engaging directly with the reader and the reader’s own doubts. When first encountering the poem
the beginning feels so conversational, it takes a second to read these lines as the start o f a poem. Once the
reader recalibrates their approach to the informal invitation as the start of a poem, the reader still has to
wonder if the narrator speaks to the reader, to himself, or to another character in the poem. In this way, the
“Prufrock” is predicated upon narrative anxiety and a feeling o f insecurity and hesitation for the reader and
the poem's speaker. In this clever way, Eliot seeks to start a dialogue to regain meaning through
conversation between art and the real world, and between the poet and the reader.
With Prufrock’s opening lines, an immediate confusion o f pronouns arises, as to if the “you,” is
intended to be the reader or a real or imagined companion (1). This confusion adds depth to the hesitating
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atmosphere and engages the reader’s fear of rejection or assumed inclusion. As critic, James Haba writes,
the “peculiar beauty o f this poem" might be that "our hesitations and reservations" "exceed” Prufrock’s (55).
Yet, if we do take the invitation, our guide just leads us deeper into this uncertain world, constantly evading
our questions and avoiding any answers; by playing with our expectations as reader, as companion, and as
to what a poem should even be, Eliot alerts the reader to the fact that world has changed and so should its
poetry. Prufrock’s desire to escape seems weighed down by his doubt and inability to know exactly what to
say as he finds him self at the end o f youth and brink of maturity. In this world o f glimpses and touches,
Eliot uses poetry to dramatize the sensation of distance and proximity between internal self and external
experience. Prufrock’s individual teenage angst registers the voice o f an emerging young adult urban
population with too much time on their hands. Eliot thus articulates cultural anxiety over a changing and
uncertain atmosphere by exposing the insecurities, desires and flaws of Prufrock through the narrator’s
consciousness laid bare.
Eliot praised Dostoevsky’s “gift” for “utilizing his weaknesses” and used this in "Prufrock," with
the state o f protracted suffering, in which Prufrock watches him self as if an etherized patient, not sure if
what he sees is real or drug-induced, if he will ever wake up for this escapist dream or hallucinatory
nightmare (qtd. in Cuda, 397). Prufrock’s weaknesses unlock his poetic capacity. Along these lines, by
seeking to expand an individual’s state o f mind to mediate the modern world, Eliot speaks to broader
cultural concerns through the mechanism of an unleashed, sprawling consciousness and engagement with
the reader’s own doubts. According to Eliot, the aspiration o f the poet emerges as the elevation o f verse into
a greater pattern o f poetic narrative, by “transmuting something rich and strange into something universal
and impersonal,” in order to engage the reader in new ways of exploring consciousness as an apparatus of
culture (qtd. in Schuchard, 213). By externalizing internal consciousness, Prufrock speaks to the reader
through the mechanism o f a mind laid bare. The effect o f this narrative voice is one of opening up, of
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opening up the reader to new, youthful and modern expression by adapting narratives from the past to make
new meanings in order to account for the urban jungle and an increasing population of young adults
looking to make meaning with their time.
In addition, Eliot provides the reader a momentary break from our own interiority as we escape
through the position as addressee beholden to Prufrock’s nightmare. The poem lures the reader in with this
hook: it tells us that we might matter as a confidant and companion. We matter because we might
understand what the speaker is attempting to say, which is presumably why he asked us to accompany him.
So even as he evades our questions, we fill in the blanks of his thought process. Our horrors become his
horrors or we reject his horrors and anticipate our own as Eliot provides the readers a Mad Libs for modern
experience and the body o f experiences expressed by Prufrock to relate to. Eliot would later write in 1919
that the poet should seek to create something greater than himself: “what happens then is a continual
surrender o f him self as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of the artist
is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction o f personality” (“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 40).
Elaborating this concept, Eliot suggests that, “the poet has not a personality to express, but a particular
medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in
peculiar and unexpected w ays” (“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 42). Thus, Eliot uses Prufrock to mediate
modern experience to the reader by collapsing the ironic outside perspective o f the poet with the narrator to
reveal a self-aware consciousness that seems very much alive in the present moment. Eliot's choice of a
teenaged persona to mediate Modern experience not only makes sense symbolically, but also shows us how
he was writing for a future generation, for those seeking the new or the next in poetry.
Eliot in "Prufrock" becomes just as he writes o f Baudelaire, “in some ways far in advance o f the
point o f view o f his own time, and yet was very much o f it” and by ironically detaching from previous
expressions o f existence, Eliot creates a model o f engagement with the world that still today provides of
Modern mechanism for accounting for experience (“Baudelaire,” 371). For Eliot, Baudelaire’s fundamental
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flaw is that his grand personality and extreme lifestyle inform his verse and tie it to a specific person and
time; as Eliot elaborates, “Baudelaire had the strength to suffer - he gathered pain to him self and studied his
suffering,” but due to the personal nature o f his work, “much o f what is perishable has entered”
(“Baudelaire,” 374 and 376). Ultimately, for Eliot, Baudelaire, “made modern art past the frontiers of the
mind,” which he thought could be dangerous, reckless and destructive (qtd. in Cuda, 402). On the other
hand, Laforgue demonstrated more control, speaking in shades o f cool, aloof irony and this level of
detachment appealed to Eliot and I think that in "Prufrock" he was working toward a poetics that tamed the
wild recklessness o f Baudelaire, yet melted the icy exterior of Laforgue.
As Maddrey points out in his study of literary influences on Eliot, Laforgue “always remained
standoffishly amused by his subjects,” while Eliot “dares to express...horrifying emotions” through his
personas (18). Maddrey eloquently describes how in Eliot’s early poetry, “Laforgue is simply a mask that
Eliot wears; as he writes more and more, the mask slips” (18). This process of slippage towards new poetics
demonstrates what critic J. Hillis Miller terms ‘“the linguistic moment,’ in which ‘the poetic medium
reflexively taking itself as its object, renders itself or its refrentiality opaque and problematic’” (qtd. in
Nicholls, 54). Unpacking this complex statement, M iller’s “linguistic moment,” emerges as the performance
o f language transforming meaning through the process of the poem and not through the poet's personality.
While I think Miller draws our attention to how a poem tries to be a world in and o f its self, I also think the
“opaque and problematic,” referentiality of "Prufrock" is alleviated through Eliot’s concrete objective
correlatives. The world o f "Prufrock" overlaps with ours. For, as Nicholls sees, modern poetics explore “the
division or tension between the subject and its other. For while the persona or mask might seem to suggest
merely a concealment o f the self, it actually exposes poetic identity as a complex weave o f different times
and different voices” (Nicholls, 54). Thus, with Eliot’s increasing impetus to an extinction of personality by
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speaking through externalized personas rather than from personal experience or a pure subjectivity, the
French Symbolist mask falls and Eliot’s own mask emerges.
Poetry about what is awaiting remains structured upon what has already been lost; Eliot’s narrator
in "Conversation Galante," if we take him speaking as a self-aware French Symbolist, speaks of the
nocturne to indicate the loss o f authentic experience of the moon, showing that he has already lost the
lady’s attention and, finally, that he remains damned to refute the poetics o f the past in a hope to create his
own verse. In this way, this narrator demonstrates Eliot working through his admiration o f the French
Symbolists with rising awareness of their predictable tropes and limitations. Laforgue justifies his
detachment and ironic disposition and Baudelaire vindicates his depravity through the pursuit o f some
higher artistic purpose romancing an Absolute. Just as Eliot writes of Baudelaire that he is “the offspring of
Romanticism, by nature the first counter-romantic in poetry,” Schuchard writes o f Eliot that he takes this
direction one step further, developing an “antiromantic sensibility” (Eliot, “Baudelaire,” 376 and Schuchard,
219).
Thus, Baudelaire undermines the simplicity o f attaining Romantic exaltation or enlightenment
through his twisted urban benders, which afforded him an approximate touch o f this sublime experience. In
Eliot however, the sea-girls do not, even momentarily, sing to Prufrock. The structure o f "Prufrock" is not
predicated upon some Romantic moment of illumination, but rather it is based upon an alternate narrative
asserting authenticity o f consciousness over the ideal of epiphany. Eliot’s sensibility that can paint
everything in an anti-romantic light, even Laforgue’s beloved moon or Baudelaire urban tourism. In
Prufrock’s love song, he has lost nothing because with or without love and passion he ends up dead, no
absolute and no insight intervening and offering an escape from ennui and annihilation. The poem’s
conclusion amplifies the relentless anti-romantic narrative, as Eliot constructs a rich sensibility of irony,
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undermining the reader’s expectations and creating a new cultural narrative for adolescent modern
experience.
III.
Prufrock the Teenager
“We come from chaos, you cannot change us
Cannot explain us and that's what makes us
We are the ageless, we are teenagers” (Public Image Ltd).
As Eliotic hermeneutics prescribe, reading "Prufrock" as a development also suggests evaluating
contemporaneous cultural changes to see what was evolving in a broader sense. Since my reading focuses
on the age o f the persona o f Prufrock and the significance of this choice, let us evaluate emergent
demographic changes from during Eliot's early lifetime. As "Prufrock" and other early works, such as
"Portrait o f a Lady," were initially drawn from Eliot’s life in American cities, I start our statistical inquiry
here and then expand to look at the European cities of Eliot’s travel in 1910. In 1880, the decade of Eliot's
birth, 71.8% o f the total population of America was considered to be living in rural areas while only 35.1%
o f the population was considered to be living in urban centers; yet in only thirty years, this statistic had
switched from urban as minority to a pretty even split with 54.4% in rural settings and 45.6 in urban
environments in 1910 (U.S. Department o f Commerce). As these numbers demonstrate, the urban
landscape rapidly became the trending reference point for American environs, especially for the younger
generation born into urban life.
European cities o f course had some time on American cities for sheer volume, but the direction of
growth appears in equally striking, skyrocketing numbers; London grew from 2,320,000 in 1850 to
6,586,00 in 1914 and Paris from 1,314,000 in 1850 to 2,714,000 in 1900 (Tomka, 331). These statics
indicate that Eliot lived in an era where both America and Europe were undergoing a marked shift in
demographics, resulting in the overall effect o f cityscape replacing countryside for a rapidly growing
number of the population. In addition to this dramatic movement to urban centers, the demographics of the
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population were also shifting and for the focus o f this paper on age, let us now look at life expectancy. In
Boston, where Eliot would attend Harvard in the early 1900s, the life expectancy for a white male in 1850
was in the thirties, yet by 1900, this number had increased into the fifties and by 1910 it was nearly sixty
(Klein, 115). So, being in one’s late teens had gone from being two-thirds through one’s life in the 1850s, to
being only one-third o f the way into one’s life in 1910, when Eliot writes Prufrock. Suddenly life stretched
out as an expanse and children had more time to grow up, more time to wallow in the state of being
between youth and adulthood, in this state o f being teenaged.
Teenagers thus emerge as a by-product o f modernization. By the early 20th century, young
Americans and Europeans increasingly had more time to grow up and "Prufrock" speaks to the emerging
experience o f this category o f identity: the anxiety, horror and boredom o f protracted adolescence. While
the word "adolescent" comes from old French and first started appearing in the 13th century, it is this state
o f protracted adolescence evolving in the 1900s that snowballs cultural anxieties as to the state of the youth
and the ramifications o f this newly produced category o f identity ("Adolescent," Oxford English
Dictionary). In his Introduction to Teenage: The Prehistory o f Youth Culture 1875-1945, writer and
journalist Jon Savage calls our attention to "the history of the quest, pursued over two different continents
and over half a century, to conceptualize, define, and control adolescence." While Savage’s research is of
much broader scope and time spectrum than covered in this paper, the Introduction to his study provides
helpful information regarding his process of reclaiming the pre-history o f youth culture in order to best
chart the development o f the teenager through time. Savage discusses early "vivid, volatile precedents],"
such as Romantic notions o f youth put forward by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late 1700s and then how
over the nineteenth century these one-offs multiplied so that "as the twentieth century gets into its
stride...the voices o f youth become less corralled by adults and more frequently heard on their own terms"
(Introduction.) Thus, Savage sees the turn of the twentieth century as the real tipping point to where this
emerging population o f outspoken, self-aware teenagers pushed the cultural need to conceptualize
adolescence to the forefront o f cultural consciousness.
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For example, Savage draws our attention to the fact that in 1904, American psychologist G.
Stanley Hall began drawing attention, in scientific and psychological research realms, to adolescence as a
specific epoch in life with the publication o f his Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to
Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (Introduction). Such a longwinded title draws our attention to the fact that little research appears to have been done into the topic if
Hall felt he had so many areas to cover. In his Preface, Hall eloquently argues for the need to approach
emerging social identities and alter psychological assumptions in response to a changing world, stating "the
studies o f the mind need new contact with life at as many points as possible" (vi). To summarize, Hall calls
attention to "our urbanized, hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its time," and since "modern
life is hard, and in many respects increasingly so, on youth," society should really start treating adolescence
"as a new birth," requiring specific structure, nurture and care, separate from initial birth into youth (xi, xiv
and xiii). As Hall characterizes the experience, "youth awakes to a new world and understands neither it nor
himself," as if seeing the world for the first time for what it is, as "the functions of every sense undergo
reconstruction, and their relations to other psychic functions change, and new sensations, some of them
very intense, arise, and new associations in the sense sphere are formed" (xv and xiv). Hall's account of
adolescent experience resonates with Eliot's description in "Hamlet and his Problems," where this
specifically heightened sensibility forms new associations rapidly in a disorienting state of developing selfawareness and awareness o f the world.
Teenagers thus developed from the chaos of modernity as offspring without a clear past and with a
dubious future, Hall sees adolescence as demanding further study, being "in most crying need of a service
we do not yet understand how to render airight" (xviii). Eliot’s parent’s generation did not understand how
to deal with their teenaged children, for when they grew up this stage was not protracted and little credence
was given to adolescence being a separate epoch requiring special attention; as a 1980s Times magazine
article referenced by the Oxford English Dictionary asserts, “teenagers, of course, had not been invented in
the 1880s” (“Teenager"). As Hall's study clearly had a lot of ground to cover and the word “teenager” does
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not appear in print until 1922, at the time Eliot writes his early works, he engenders a dialogue regarding an
emerging phenomenon o f modernizing identity (“Teenager,” Oxford English Dictionary). To reiterate, with
Prufrock, Eliot utilizes a persona speaking from a place of teenagehood, utilizing a rapidly evolving
category o f identity representative o f Modernity to speak to new experiences. Unlike the personified Life of
"Spleen," Prufrock is an authentic persona gathering together cultural change by embodying a modernly
produced identity o f being a teenager.
As critics M iller and David Spurr both emphasize in their readings o f "Prufrock," the confusion of
tenses expresses restlessness with self and surroundings, a state of mind that aligns with Hall’s
characterization and what might now be called teenage angst. A catchphrase such as teenage angst captures
a body o f experiences and gathers it into a linguistic sign, like a signature, that encapsulates the essence of
this expansive range o f experience. By containing a sprawling, unruly topic into a singular unit of
representation, we can isolate and dissect a complex concept. The Prufrock body functions in this way as a
unifying signifier o f experience. Eliot utilizes the Prufrock persona to express a variety of experiences and
to explore new frontiers o f consciousness, for which there were not easy verbal equivalents. As Eliot
writes, Baudelaire and Laforgue show him that “the business of the poet was to make poetry out of the
unexplored resources o f the unpoetical” (To Criticize the Critic, 126). Eliot thus develops Prufrock from
reading the French Symbolists verse full of unpoetical “teenaged experience” (Hannoosh, 345). The
Prufrock persona bridges the gap between sign and signifier for he functions as both; Eliot overrides the
limitations o f language to speak to authentic, unexplored areas o f modern experience by pushing the
frontiers o f first person subjectivity to emulate the experience o f consciousness.
Ackroyd describes that through Eliot’s encounter with Laforgue, Eliot “could see him self clearly
from the outside, as it were - and in that act of self-identification he learned how to speak freely for the
first tim e” (34). Through Prufrock, Eliot externalizes his own readerly process of identification and seeing
him self outside him self, developing a culturally viable narrative predicated upon intimacy between reader
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and speaker. Furthermore, if Eliot feels changed through reading another poet speaking to teenaged urban
experience in an authentic way, it seems Eliot might want to recreate this sense of connection for his
readers, to offer a foothold o f meaning and identification in an unstable, changing world. Eliot speaks
freely by baring the mind o f his teenaged narrator and letting the reader troll through this persona’s
consciousness; so that, on one level Eliot exploits a persona’s vulnerability through projecting Prufrock’s
mind to the reader and, on another level, he invites the reader to connect with this startlingly authentic
portrayal as possibly a mirror o f their own Modern teenaged consciousness. He stages coming o f age as a
narrative o f uncertainty, discomfort and existential crisis and offers the reader a chance to identify with this
experience.
In a later lecture, The Frontiers o f Criticism, “Eliot recommended that readers o f a poem should
endeavor to grasp what the poem is aiming to b e.... he suggested they should try to grasp its ‘entelechy,’ a
word which in Aristotle emphasizes purpose” (Mays, 108). I would argue that “Prufrock” is aiming to be a
new voice in poetry, a development of the past into a poem that embodies an emerging category of identity
for which language alone is inadequate; the poem aims to be a new narrative o f experience and
consciousness providing meaning to coming o f age as a teenager in the Modern world. Establishing
Prufrock as a teenager attests to what I interpret Eliot as aiming to do with this poem: to push the
experimental innovations o f the French Symbolists to connect with an English tradition o f poetry through
utilizing an unstable Modern identity as a mechanism for encompassing all experience and exploring the
unpoetic. I think critics might be overlooking the fact that "Prufrock" arises from the failure of "Spleen;"
the personification in "Spleen" is Mitchell's concept o f Prufrock as a caricature of a middle-aged Modern
Man and Eliot clearly discards this type o f immature, faulty crutch in favor of a more authentic, developed
narrative voice. If Eliot is trying to find material to write "new poetry," would he not want a fresh voice, a
voice that is very much o f the present {To Criticize the Critic, 126)? Eliot thus follows his own directive to
poets by engaging “in the present moment o f the past...not of what is dead, but of what is already living,”
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through Prufrock the teenager (“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 44). Now, I want to turn to the poem to
discuss why the age o f the narrator is an essential question of the poem reference the textual moments that
lead me to my reading o f Prufrock as teenaged.
Prufrock’s obsession with aging and time naturally raise questions regarding the eponymous
narrator's age. To answer this fundamental uncertainty, critics generally follow readings such as David
Rosen's in his article “T.S. Eliot and the Lost Youth of American Poetry,” that focus on Prufrock’s reference
to his bald spot in order to nail down the narrator as unequivocally middle aged. I find it surprising, that
despite all o f Prufrock's evasion o f questions and inability to say what he means, critics generally take his
self-representation literally, reading him as the middle-aged man he describes in these lines. Yet, Prufrock
mentions concerns over what people “will” say about his signs of age, rather than what they currently say,
which indicates a future tense fear rather than a presently occurring phenomenon, suggesting that he is not
yet old, but rather imagining becoming so (44). In addition, I read Prufrock’s bald spot as referencing his
apprehension o f sexual inadequacy, the creepy sensation o f eyes on the back o f his head and, on an even
deeper level, that too much o f his mind is visible to those around them (4). He feels “like a patient,” being
“spread out,” dissected, studied and ultimately judged (3 and 2).
Rosen emphasizes the peculiarity o f the twenty-something poet taking on the voice o f a middleaged character pathetically obsessing over his receding hairline and lost mojo (488). Yet, Rosen does not
question critical consensus as to the narrator’s age and just tries to makes sense of Eliot’s odd use o f a
middle-aged narrator as a means for Eliot to assuage concerns of lacking poetic authority (484). However,
taking into account the young narrators in Eliot’s other early verse, such as "Portrait of a Lady," and his re­
working o f the French Symbolists as we have discussed, Eliot exhibits no prior pattern of relying upon the
age o f his narrators to establish authority. If anything, he demonstrates a missive of writing from an
adolescent point o f view in order to best address present Modern experience. So, while Eliot’s Prufrock
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certainly speaks o f middle age, I read these concerns around growing old as expressing a young man’s
anxiety about entering into adulthood, rather than middle-aged man’s fear o f encroaching old age. I find it
important to assert this reading o f Prufrock as a teenager in order to position the poem as connecting to
both Eliot's poetic and critical oeuvre and to a larger cultural narrative o f young adult experience that
became an essential script for modernity.
In terms of directly relating "Prufrock" to Eliot’s critical works, Prufrock’s allusion to Hamlet
provides an excellent starting point Reading the poem, with Eliot’s body o f work in mind, I naturally turn
to Eliot’s later essay on Hamlet to see what this allusion might mean. In his essay "Hamlet and his
Problems," Eliot discusses adolescent experience as a type of poetic sensibility, writing that “the intensity
o f feeling without any object, or exceeding its object.... often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person
puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down by his feelings to fit the business world; the artist keeps them
alive by the ability to intensify the world to his emotions” (126). Thus, for Eliot, an adolescent point of
view embodies artistic intensity o f feeling and offers a valuable means of translating experience through
intensifying the world to match the inner sensation. In Eliot’s critique, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a failure
because the playwright fails to adequately intensify the world in an authentic way and by giving Hamlet
insufficient situations to sort out, the "mad" prince's emotions seem disproportionate (126). Really the
bottom line for Eliot is that Shakespeare's Hamlet is incapable of seeing him self outside himself, he lacks
self-awareness and irony and, as such, is bereft of a modern sensibility.
Eliot distinguishes that “the Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet o f Shakespeare is
not, he has not the explanation or excuse” (126). Unpacking this statement is tricky, but Eliot is speaking
not of literal age, rather, o f a type of persona as a mechanism for translating a sensibility and perspective.
Eliot is discussing Laforgue's posthumously published M oralites legendaires, a series o f six short stories
written in 1887 from the point o f view o f literary characters, including Hamlet, written in paradoic style. It
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seems that Eliot realizes the possibility in Laforgue's version of the play for the adolescent consciousness as
capable o f crystallizing an expression o f Modernity. Looking at other critical responses contemporary to
Eliot's 1919 essay show a similar anticipation of the Modern nature of Laforgue's ironic Hamlet. As critic
James Huneker elaborates in 1915,
"Laforgue's Hamlet is of tomorrow, for every epoch orchestrates anew its vision of
Hamlet. The eighteenth century had one; the nineteenth another; and our generation a
fresher. But we know of
none so vital as this fantastic thinker of Laforgue's. He must
have had his ear close to the Time- Spirit, so aptly has he caught the vibrations of his
whirring loom, so closely to these vibrations has he attuned the keynote of his twentieth
century Hamlet" (91).
Thus, when Eliot writes "Prufrock," he is also seeking to continue to cultivate Laforgue's "twentieth
century Hamlet" (Huneker, 91). We can infer from Eliot inclusion o f a reference to Hamlet in "Prufrock,"
that he is very much purposeful and aware in trying to develop Laforgue's adolescent Hamlet beyond
parody o f an original into a mechanism for expressing Modern experience.
When Prufrock declares, "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be," continuing to say he
is more o f a Polonius type anyway, he is placing him self into this continued narrative of Hamlet's through
time (111). No other exclamation points appear in the poem except in alarmed and anxious parenthetical
asides about hair, receding on his head and appearing on the arms o f women, so this sharp interruption
certainly draws our attention to the narrator's protest as expressing a fear o f his proximity to the character
o f the infamously indecisive Hamlet. Yet, Prufrock is Eliot's "Hamlet o f Laforgue," an adolescent whose
sense o f being beholden to watching him self fail is ironically translated through Prufrock's projections of
his thoughts; Prufrock is not mad, he is Modern. Eliot thus realizes that taking the sensations and anxieties
o f adolescence provides a mechanism for transforming the unpoetic world into art. This idea of intensifying
the world to one’s emotions for poetic exegesis forms the backbone o f Eliot’s notion o f “objective
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correlative,” an idea he also develops in his essay on Hamlet (124). As Eliot demonstratively asserts, “the
only way o f expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a
set o f objects, a situation, a chain o f events which shall be the formula o f that particular emotion” (124125).
In this way, emotions should not be described or exaggerated, but rather embodied. While I would
suggest to Eliot that the ghost offers an object that matches the extremes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I
understand from his brief analysis that the main issue is that the world of the play vastly does not reflect the
horror Hamlet speaks o f and Hamlet sees unaware of this discrepancy. Eliot sees Shakespeare as failing as
an artist to make poetic the “intractable material” of the play; basically Eliot, thinks Shakespeare was
sloppy, superfluous and lacked intentionality with the disquieting material he stirs up, so that the puzzling
inconsistency makes the play an “an artistic failure” (123). Along these lines, recall that for Eliot “the
source o f new poetry,” could be found in turning “the intractably unpoetic into poetry,” thus as in his essay
on Hamlet, his poetics is based upon the need to wrestle with, and give form to, intractably unpoetic
material in order to create art (Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, 126). The objective correlative thus functions
as a way to bring stubborn gray matter into form through concentrated, purposeful artistic visioning, the
sort o f all-encompassing sensibility that is concentrated adolescence. Prufrock and his teenaged sensibility
therefore intensify the world through figurative exaggeration and isolated moments o f unease to show the
morbid horror and boredom, insatiable desire, and uncontrollable repulsion o f Modern life. Objective
correlatives enable Eliot to contain intractable, unpoetic sensations and translate these to the reader through
poetic images; for a quick example, the "butt-ends of my days and ways," carry a multiplicity of
associations, translating an apprehension o f wasted time, uncontrollable automatic behavior, repetition and
monotony, fear o f chemical dependency and an insatiable desperation to take the edge off (60).
To better grasp this nuanced concept o f objective correlative, critic Bernard Sharratt offers an
important distinction between Eliot’s objective correlative and the poetic mechanisms of his
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contemporaries, the modern school of imagism (234). As Sharratt describes, imagists such as Pound, used
simple direct language to build to a single image metaphor as lynchpin to the poem’s insight (234). For
example, Pound’s famous "In a Station of the Metro," “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals
on a wet, black bough;” this is a striking and direct metaphor connecting the faces to petals, while the use of
the word apparition implies a certain gloom and describes the crowd like a phantasm until related to a stark
image o f nature (1-2). Thus, through the contrast o f white and black this metaphor elevates our perception
o f both images; Pound provides an instantaneous, intuitive discovery that this modern world of the metro
station is just another type o f natural environ: an urban jungle. While still building images into significant
sites o f meaning, Eliot disrupts this precise, focus of the imagists by invoking a swirling series o f images
with a multiplicity o f connotations, like a chain reaction to explore consciousness through an allencompassing sensibility. In Eliot the imperative of insight is displaced by the prerogative of stream of
consciousness authenticity.
Prufrock speaks in external monologue further externalized through the images that form objective
correlatives to specific states o f being and complex emotions. Eliot picks up the monologue form that had
been frequently utilized by the Romantics, Victorians and Symbolists, but develops a means of being
outside his speaker while drawing the reader in with the phantasm o f permeable first-person subjectivity. I
call Prufrock a phantasm for he is the performance body, or illusion, of singular consciousness and not
collapsible with the poet as a real first-person narrator or a character. Prufrock is a projection of Eliot’s
poetics. Eliot’s play between external poet and objective reality, and internal persona and subjective vision,
builds a unique tone o f voice and approach to speaking. As critic Charles Altieri describes, “it is the wary
indirectness that seems most striking, as if for the first time poetry took account for a cultural situation”
("Eliot's Impact on Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Poetry," 196). While I would contend that
Romanticism and Victorianism took into account the “cultural situation” as a response to urbanization and
apprehension o f cultural bankruptcy, I think Altieri ultimately intends to highlight Eliot’s tone in "Prufrock"
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as not forcibly and obviously poetic with a certain moment o f insight in mind, but more familiar and
conversational tone without fear o f raising ambiguous images to allude to life as complex and unresolved.
In a later essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot elaborates the reasoning behind his approach:
“our civilization comprehends great variety and com plexity...the poet must become more and more
comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his
meaning” (248). Eliot’s engagement with this cultural “variety and complexity” through the use of allusions,
temporal fluidity and modern world images, forms this tone Altieri perceives as groundbreaking ("The
Metaphysical Poets," 248). Through an externalized monologue projecting human consciousness in the
present moment of the modern world, Eliot seeks to “dislocate language into his meaning” (“The
Metaphysical Poets," 248). To begin this process, Eliot immediately disrupts expectations of narrative
voice by utilizing a narrator speaking from a point of disordered experience, a chronological gap between
childhood and adulthood: a teenager. Prufrock embodies what Eliot wishes to indicate about the
experience o f culture and identity at odds with time, body, perception, reception, voice and place in the
world; Prufrock as a teenager provides Eliot an all-encompassing mechanism of experience and a new
voice emerging in the modern world capable of disrupting boundaries through expressing and embodying
change, conflict and complexity.
The teen years stand as a metaphoric presence of a transformative gap between childhood and
adulthood so this position is one capable of bridging the extremes, the hypocrisies and the ironies as one
undergoes development and identity formation. Thus, from an authorial perspective, the teenager offers a
threshold space o f frightening unpredictability with extreme instability of identity that functions as a
mechanism capable o f containing this disruption while disrupting. The importance of reclaiming Prufrock
as a teenager is to realize the poem’s role in seeking to place itself at the epicenter o f Modernity through
engaging in a narrative o f urban adolescent identity. Returning again to Eliot’s quote in my introduction,
Baudelaire shows him “that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had,
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in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry” (To Criticize the Critic, 126). For Eliot,
the source o f new poetry lies in these urban images and adolescent experiences, the complex material of
“the present moment o f the past... not o f what is dead, but of what is already living” (“The Metaphysical
Poets,” 44). "Prufrock" thus amalgamates Eliot’s earlier attempts at working with this sort of material, as he
seeks to transmute ‘something rich and strange, [into] something universal and impersonal’” (qtd. in
Schuchard, 213). This “‘something rich and strange,'” would be Eliot’s own experience as an urban teenager
and he pushes to transform his specific subjectivity into a universal narrative through objectively opening
up a teenaged consciousness to the reader’s view (qtd. in Schuchard, 213).
As Eliot writes, “the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only
a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected
ways” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 42). Prufrock as teenaged mechanism mediates modern experience. The
peculiar mindset and preoccupations of Prufrock all read as the journal entry of a particularly creative and
morbid teenager. Prufrock’s discomfort with female sexuality, distaste for social obligations, nocturnal
wanderings, suicidal fantasies and philosophical musings, typify behaviors we have come to consider as
teenaged. Prufrock must sort through nightmares, fantasies, and fictions, as he seeks for a true self he is not
even sure exists, is worth seeking, or will even satisfy him when he finds it. Prufrock struggles with self
and self-expression; he feels he has to “prepare a face,” to meet certain people but cannot shut up about it
(27). He claims to not be a "prophet," but then predicts his own entire miserable future (83). In the fourth
stanza, Prufrock insistently repeats the refrain that “there will be time,” and “time yet for a hundred visions
and revisions” and the thought o f all this time hanging heavy on the horizon like the “etherized” evening is
paralyzing (23, 33 and 3).
After imagining all the future taking of “toast and tea,” and the circuitous redundancy of the
women who “come and go / Talking of M ichelangelo,” Prufrock finds him self exhausted (34 and 13-14).
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Arrested in his ennui, he then begins to start to imagine him self in old age: “with a bald spot in the middle
o f my hair” (40). I read all these conflicting moments not as Prufrock the character o f the neurotic, overly
intellectual elitist middle-aged man, but as part of Prufrock, the archetypal teenager, already bored with the
routines o f life and rebelling against the demands of society. Thus, in "Prufrock" we meet a young man
uncomfortable with his impulses and desires, constantly confronted with social demands o f who he is
supposed to be and subsequent sensations o f failure to be this, or to want to be anything really, pushing him
to fantasize his annihilation. Prufrock’s desire to escape seems weighed down by his doubt, confusion, and
inability to know exactly what to say as he finds him self at the end o f youth and on the brink of maturity. In
this world o f glimpses, touches and distance between self and experience, Eliot’s voice emerged as Modern
for its ironic self-awareness, narrating consciousness as an out o f body experience and articulating internal
anxiety through an external atmosphere, speaking to the intractably complex relationship between self and
environment. The awareness o f being in a Modernizing world as the unprecedented present, felt out o f time
and place, so Eliot naturally chose a narrator who speaks from a similar position by virtue of his adolescent
consciousness.
IV. Eliot as Victorian Child Coming o f Age
“And when I'm lying in my bed
I think about life
and I think about death
and neither one particularly appeals to me
and if the day came when I felt a
natural emotion
I’d get such a shock I'd probably lie
in the middle o f the street and die
I'd lie down and die” (The Smiths, “Nowhere Fast.”)
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In addition to teasing out Eliot’s engagement with the French Symbolists, another powerful way to
articulate the development o f Eliot’s voice can be found in how he engages with poetry from the
immediately preceding Victorian and Romantic periods. I find a comparison between "Prufrock” and two
poems from the oeuvre o f Matthew Arnold to be particularly fruitful. I chose Arnold's work since many
critics consider him to be “a precursor to Modernism" (Mazzeno, 77). In addition, as Jeffery M. Perl’s
article "Dictatorship o f Relativism" highlights, in his lectures entitled "The Use of Poetry," Eliot speaks
directly o f Matthew Arnold; Eliot characterizes Arnold as being out o f touch with the “horror and glory” of
modern life, but knowing “something o f the boredom” (qtd. in Perl, 356). I find this quote very intriguing
and by unpacking Eliot's account o f Arnold provides additional insight into Eliot's poetics and the evolution
o f the Prufrockian model. Similar the French Symbolists, Arnold offers Eliot a bridge from the past to the
future development o f poetry, yet in this case Eliot's criticism of Arnold informs his progression. As Eliot
describes during his lecture, "in the criticism of Arnold we find a continuation o f the work o f the Romantic
poets with a new appraisal o f the poetry of the past by a method which....gropes toward wider and deeper
connexions" (114). Eliot sees Arnold as engaging in the focus of his lecture, the "progress in selfconsciousness" which epitomizes the development of poetry in Modernity, but ultimately finds Arnold
overwhelmed by attempts to assert poetry as superseding religion and philosophy (106).
Eliot's criticism boils down to his perception that Arnold "hardly looks ahead to a new stage of
experience," and "never saw life as a whole," remaining stuck in "a painful position," between "faith and
disbelief' (95, 103 and 106). My focus is not defending Arnold in the face o f Eliot's criticism, but rather to
point out that Eliot is greatly engaged in pointing out exactly the limitations of Arnold and desiring to
destabilize the boundaries that hedged in Arnold's poetics. I would like to suggest that Eliot finds in
Arnold's criticism and poetry, the material o f Modernism, for it is part of the development of selfconsciousness and awareness o f the need to push poetry to say new things in new ways. Arnold him self
feels part o f the progress o f poetry as a medium articulating shifting cultural consciousness. In an 1869
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letter to his mother, Arnold writes, “my poems represent, on the whole, the main movement o f mind of the
last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to
themselves o f what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it”
(qtd. in Ferry, 153). Thus, both Eliot and Arnold articulate strong investments in what poetry should say or
do in the face o f the changing mental mindscape o f Modern cultural, yet, as we will see, Arnold’s rendition
o f these concerns skews into poetry as a moral or pedantic tool providing comfort and guidance to a
spiritually bankrupt and suffering Modern society, leaving Eliot space to explore the unclaimed territories
o f Arnold’s poetry.
Let us first look at similarities between Eliot's 1909 "Prufrock" and Arnold's 1855 poem, "Stanzas
from the Grand Chartreuse.” In this work, Arnold describes the protagonist as “wandering between two
worlds, one dead, / the other powerless to be born” (85-86). By undertaking an action of wandering, yet
having no power to make either world come to life, Arnold creates an atmosphere o f ambivalence and
futility: this “something o f the boredom,” Eliot finds in Arnold that he develops in "Prufrock" (Eliot qtd. in
Perl, 356). Imagining him self tight-roping the boundary between a dead world of the past and an unborn
world o f the future, Arnold’s speaker could inhabits a threshold temporal space and could very much be a
teenager as well. Arnold’s narrator awaits some change in the world around him in protracted state of
reflection. In his article, "Arnold and Tennyson: The Plight of Victorian Lyricism as Context of
Modernism," critic Charles Altieri observes that Arnold begins to speak in tones o f Modernism about
Modernist issues, but his “particular vision o f culture as a critical tool keeps forcing Arnold back on his
subjective problems while ironically complicating his efforts to achieve a personal voice” (288). Altieri
therefore suggests that A rnold’s development o f a poetics becomes constrained by the burden o f the ethical
and moral responsibility to awaken a culture to its own degradation and decline.
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Thus, Altieri discerns that Arnold’s personal voice becomes subsumed into a larger Victorian trope
o f the social-minded tract about the suffering o f all and the righting o f social injustice. For example,
consider the progression after two elegiac, initially Prufrockian lines:
“W andering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side” (Arnold, 85-89).
After melancholically musing on his identity and temporality that defy categorization, Arnold's narrator
turns to Victorian investments in strife over existence and a shared suffering in urban toil. We can follow
Altieri to infer that Arnold considered his artistic responsibility as one of speaking to the cultural plight, of
addressing poverty, human rights violations and urban conditions; Arnold's work therefore attests to a sense
of spiritual and aesthetic bankruptcy experienced in a world of rapid secularism and commodification.
Arnold’s speaker seems to be collapsed with the poet himself, indicating a feeling of being crushed by the
weight o f an artistic soul attuned to social responsibility and the overall enormity o f such a task. Arnold
therefore speaks to the state of disillusionment and Eliot picks up this discourse at the state of being
disillusioned through the narrative voice o f "Prufrock."
In Arnold’s narration, he offers no reprieve from this forlorn, forsaken state o f affairs; existence
seems to be mocking the narrator: “for the world cries your faith is now / But a dead time's exploded
dream ” (97-98). While these lines could be the unspoken dialogue of "Prufrock," to substantiate his
narrator’s experience o f the world, Eliot encapsulates emotions into objects. Eliot provides physical
evidence for Prufrock’s experience through externalizing an internal monologue and displacing Romantic
longing for insight with an all-encompassing sensibility of Modern disillusionment. For example, Eliot's
“evening spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table” embodies the sensation Arnold
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describes o f powerlessly wandering between the past and the future (2-3). Critic A.R. Jones draws our
attention to the “aggressive m odernity” of these lines, as “their conceit shocks the reader,” as any kind of
anticipated insight expected from this classic symbol of the expansive evening sky becomes strategically
replaced by a restricting and delimiting morbid, modern image (215). Schuchard concurs, seeing the poem's
“startling imagery” as "wholly rejects Romantic apprehensions of nature,” signaled from the initial image of
the night sky suddenly supplanted by a scene from medical theatre o f the etherized patient (110).
Altieri argues that while most critics simplify Eliot’s critique o f the Victorians as a natural
inclination to reject immediate artist predecessors, if we instead pause to uncover how Eliot registers his
departure through direct engagement with Victorian poetry, we can gain excellent insights into Eliot’s
poetics (281). Critics overlook the extent of Eliot’s engagement with the Victorians quite possibly due to
Eliot's essay on the Metaphysical poets, wherein he denounces Victorians as suffering from a “disassociated
sensibility” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 247). As Eliot expands this phrase: “It is something which had
happened to the mind o f England between the time of Donne... and the time o f Tennyson and Browning; it
is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets,
and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose" (“The Metaphysical
Poets,” 247). Eliot’s notion o f sensuous perception relies upon engagement with thought as immediate and
timeless; therefore, it is an epoch, yet also an endless narrative of seeking meaning: an intellectual and
aesthetic quest across time. Through this process, Eliot believes the poet can “dislocate language into
meaning,” as he brings the reader back into sensuous contact with language at the aporia between a word
and its meaning in order to reenact the formation o f meaning as an act o f personally and culturally viable
signification (“The Metaphysical Poets," 248).
To see Eliot registering his development through departure from the Victorians, let us return to a
comparison with Arnold's verse. For example, what exactly does Arnold intend to intimate with the phrase,
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“dead tim e’s exploded dream” (98)? The emotional impact o f this statement loses force as we are lost in the
words, not sure what the narrator means. This phrase could be read as an elegiac statement that mourns the
death of the past, or o f past hopes, and it could also just be a description o f how time feels frozen. The
explosion o f the dream suggests this dream’s potency is dispersed and now spent, distant, and never to be
found again. In "Prufrock" however, Eliot provides a proliferation o f objective correlatives to substantiate
the state o f emotion hinted at by these line from Arnold’s verse. For instance, Prufrock’s assertion “I know
the voices dying with a dying fall / beneath the music from a farther room,” or the images o f “all the buttends o f my days and ways,” and, "m easuring] out" "life in coffee spoons” (52-53, 60 and 52). All o f these
lines are poignant in their specificity, immediacy and physicality; the way Eliot localizes and disperses
metaphysical abstraction into everyday real world objects emerges as a strategy o f translating
consciousness. Recall Eliot's investment in exposing the unpoetical as the material for new poetry to build
authentic meaning through direct engagement with the Modern world. In addition, the directive of
authenticity overrides the imperative o f insight, so Eliot's poetry naturally hovers in the dusty gray area
between a unified vision and a disordered dream.
The bottom line for Eliot is the reader’s experience and he therefore seeks to emulate Dante,
Donne and Laforgue to create a “mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,”
translating the sensation o f consciousness, of being alive in that moment, to the reader (“The Metaphysical
Poets,” 247). While Eliot utilizes metonymic builds to metaphoric reveals, he works to “directly connect
objects to feelings so that both are as immediate” which produces a sense o f meaning being made through
consciousness unleashed (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 247). By drawing the poles o f metonymy and
metaphor together, Eliot’s poetry enacts a type o f transformation, wherein the real objects of the world
stand for larger metaphoric meaning. With images such as the sky becoming a patient, Eliot imbues objects
with the atmosphere and with increasing meaning, creating a texture engaging multiple levels o f cultural
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consciousness by localizing awareness, meaning and reality not on another plane, but in present everyday
objects. In his groundbreaking work on metonymy, linguistic theorist Roman Jakobson describes this
process: “following the path o f contiguous relationships, the realistic author metonymically digresses from
the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to setting,” so that the precise atmosphere and setting
become integral to meaning o f objects and to the overall work (1114).
Consequently, it is “perfume from a dress” that makes Prufrock’s mind "digress” (65-66). As
Prufrock's mind jum ps constantly between interiority and exteriority, Eliot, the poet, very much controls
this movement as an exercise in metonymy, weaving an overall metaphoric structure that breaks down the
boundaries between thought and objects and between consciousness and environment. Eliot criticizes the
Victorians for what Altieri characterizes as a “tendency to hypostasize...because they lacked lucid analysis
and dramatic control” (281). With this statement, I think Altieri absolutely hits the nail on the head: Eliot
abhorred this perceived lack o f dramatic control and substitution of the absent or longed-for absolute reality
for the present and concrete authentic experience of meaning. As Eliot states, "Arnold represents a perioud
o f stasis," "his poetry is too reflective [and] too ruminative" (95 and 114). For Eliot, Arnold's criticism
furthermore embodies these problems, for when Arnold states that "'the greatness of a poet...lies in his
powerful and beautiful application o f ideas to life,"' Eliot points out that such an ill-conceived, loose
statement implies that ideas function as “a lotion for the inflammed skin of suffering humanity" (Arnold as
qtd. in Eliot, 104 and Eliot, 104). Eliot’s reading o f Arnold’s aesthetic statement forms a perfect example of
the aesthetic Eliot seeks to create through generating objective correlatives to replace vague thoughts with
concrete images, in a way that is not always pleasant, but frequently derisive, dark and ironic.
Altieri therefore argues that Eliot’s Modernist impulse arises from engagement with Victorian
poetry and that Eliot condenses the amorphous Victorian texture of Tennyson and Arnold into the concrete
building blocks o f Modernism. Eliot transforms Victorian amelioration into a cure for Modern
consciousness. Eliot's material for Modernism therefore lies in what he perceives as the unfinished,
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unresolved business o f the Victorians: thoughts without objects, disturbing corners o f the mind
accumulating dust and the exhuming buried lives. As Altieri specifies in terms of Arnold, with Arnold's
“access to deeper private or at least pre-linguistic parts o f the self, Arnold leaves Modernism a heritage in
which the public analytic language of self-consciousness and the dream o f a profound, unconscious
authenticity are irreconcilable and yet necessary features of human being” (292). Arnold thus engages in a
dialogue o f self-consciousness and authenticity, yet positions these ideals beyond words. Such a positioning
dramatizes the distance, or alienation, that individuals feel from awareness and authenticity, and that the
poet experiences from both the world, and the seeming intractable distance between his words and his
desired meaning.
Arnold's aesthetic vision precludes escape into irony or the defense mechanism o f poetic
techniques, such as Eliot's objective correlative, for the Victorian poet remains forever beholden to an ideal;
as Altieri articulates, “when one needs a total vision...to overcome his alienation from the present, one is
not likely to find a satisfying dramatic image or objective correlative synthesizing the various strands o f the
discourse” (288). Crucially, Eliot does not begin "Prufrock," from the point o f view o f his Victorian
upbringing o f Arnoldian alienation from the present, wherein the world fails to realize and support Arnold's
vision; Eliot instead marks his coming o f age by rebelling against the limitations o f this paradigm of
alienation from the flawed extant world through fearlessly engaging with the fragmented present as the
source material for new poetry. To reiterate, growing up in a world o f failed absolutes and fear of false
reality, Eliot develops artistic survival mechanisms, evolving new poetic strategies ironically undermining
Victorian alienation, through positioning engagement with the present and relentless s e lf awareness as the
site for new poetry.
In "Prufrock," Eliot thus disperses the tension o f a potential failed epiphanic build into a multitude
o f unfinished sentences and further displaces this tension by asserting real world images as containing
significance and meaning. Whereas the pressure and directive for a singular consecrated insight
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overwhelms the speaking voice o f Arnold’s " Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse,” Eliot's speaker
negotiates his modern space with a flowing consciousness emulating authenticity. As Altieri observes,
Arnold places the “self-reflexive turn immediately after a typical Romantic meditation on the present
scene;” as “the poet turns on him self and recognizes his alienation, ‘And what am I, that I am here?’”
(Altieri, 288). The speaker o f this poem cannot reconcile his vision of what should matter with the
exigencies o f his day to day life; as Altieri envisions, the poem’s only answer to this questions is in effect ‘I
am one who will never be here; I have given my heart away to an ideal faith that only mocks present
experience’” (288). With these lines, Arnold thus expresses his sensation o f alienation from the present in
terms o f separation from an ideal, with complete sincerity, holding up no ironic shield to cut the tension.
Altieri explicates that Arnold’s faith here is not religious, but rather a belief in the sanctity and purity o f a
cohesive cultural vision (288-289).
Altieri considers Arnold’s melancholic pathos as expressing the plight o f Victorian lyricism,
wherein “culture still gives ideal versions o f the self, but now it becomes a history o f those whose ideals
have failed; culture itself becomes only another dead religion, at once oppressive and inescapable in the
impotence o f its monumental grandeur” (288-289). While Arnold’s verse positions culture as the solution,
his poetry problematizes this assertion by veering towards an escape from this crushing burden. As Arnold
cries in "Grand Chartreuse:”
“Be man henceforth no more a prey
To those out-dated stings again!
The nobleness o f grief is gone
Ah, leave us not the fret alone!” (105-109).
Layered expressions o f abandonment form a refrain o f departure, yet Arnold offers no destination for this
escape. The new world is “powerless to be born,” and the grief experienced in the face o f wandering a dead,
inhospitable earth no longer satiates the lyrical needs of the alien artist (86). This plight becomes, as the
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title o f Altieri’s article asserts, the ’’context o f Modernism." Modernism, such as Eliot's verse, destabilizes
the burden o f recovering what was lost with cultural change and urbanization, by replacing this
overwhelming absence with the presence o f something new, that could overcome the tension between
Romanticism and Empiricism and exonerate poetry into exploring strange new terrains of experience.
There is a poignant beauty to Arnold's aesthetic of seeking noble truth and attesting to melancholia
and nostalgic sorrow, so 1 would specifically add to Altieri’s analysis that Eliot exploits the poetic potential
o f the struggl ing artistic souls o f Romanticism through the incomplete thoughts and dialogue in "Prufrock."
Eliot presents Prufrock’s allusions to ineffability and the inexpressible pain o f unrealized everyday
existence through deceptively complex cutaways to dialogue scenes lacking specific temporality. For
example, as readers we are not sure if these conversations have actually occurred, are presently happening,
or if Prufrock imagines these scenes as evocative visions o f future misery and failure: this layering of
possible temporalities engenders an overriding and unnerving sensation o f anxiety expose from all sides. In
some cases, the reader cannot even be certain who is speaking; for example, consider the following lines:
"If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window should say:
’That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all'" (107-110).
In these lines, we are not sure if the quotation marks indicate that the dialogue is that of the
companion or reader, or if this punctuation alludes to Prufrock's out-of-body experience observing his
socially-constructed persona interact with social scenes. The absolute sorrow o f a lost moment to clearly
express one’s self and the additional loss o f meaning through another person's misunderstanding, exploits
tropes o f Romantic and Victorian regret and melancholia.
In other words, Eliot uses Victorianism and Romanticism as material for Modernism, he
condenses the power o f lyrical sorrow into these minute dialogue scenes which invoke the nostalgia o f his
youth: harnessing the power o f his idealistic, lyrical Victorian childhood, Eliot develops the French
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Symbolist "poetry o f waiting rooms," into a bittersweet Modern teenage ballad, a love song that is not
about love at all (Eliot, "Baudelaire," 379). Prufrock's song is about giving form, giving embodiment, to the
Modern disembodied consciousness and forming a poetics that speaks authentically to what lies beyond the
past through projecting a presence and a future presence. For when Prufrock does complete a thought, such
as “ragged claws / scuttling across the sea floor,” he speaks in Modernist tones, projecting his mind into a
concrete dream o f what he desires to be (5). Prufrock's sense o f feeling absent in the vessel o f his socially
performed self, can be materialized through this image of the crab, which expresses an existential moment
o f all-inclusive temporality. Eliot develops the negatives, he looks to the fog, the dust, the darkness, the
lingering dialogue, the present vagueness and the sensation o f absence, the haunting future and the rapidly
disappearing past and seeks to give all these seemingly disparate pieces of self-consciousness form.
"Prufrock" thus articulates a shift from Romanticism to Modernism, as Eliot leaves larger
questions unanswered and instead asserts metonymic footholds snowballing into an authentic rendering of
what it means to be a Modern consciousness in the present world. Thus, "Prufrock" demonstrates the
process o f disengagement with Romantic ideals and displacement of these cultural and poetic modes of
exegesis and catharsis as Eliot, the poet, remains outside his narrative voice, killing Prufrock off when he
begins to wallow in Romantic pathos at the end o f the poem. Prufrock's apprehension o f the sea-girls not
signing to him is not a straight-forward parody of Romanticism, rather, this moment offers Eliot the chance
to clarify his separation from the narrative voice and from Romantic impulses, by asserting that a new way
o f connecting with the reader through a shared experience of Modern self must emerge if poetry is to mean
anything to the Modern world. Prufrock’s self-pity climaxes in the failure o f past muses to acknowledge his
presence and Eliot eclipses the lyrical potency o f Prufrock’s experience with his abrupt decision to drown
the narrator.
Significantly, “human voices,” are the impetus o f Prufrock’s demise, for the world demands to be
related to and Eliot poetically displaces the Romantic melancholia o f Arnold’s lyricism with modern irony
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(131). Through deconstructing Arnold’s dead world, Eliot builds a new one. Eliot disrupts expectations of
confessional sincerity and emotional expressivity, through a sly sense o f humor wherein Prufrock mocks
his own self-pity; for it is not so much that Prufrock is insincere, as that he is completely vulnerable, seeing
him self both inside and outside himself. In "Prufrock," Eliot develops failed Romanticism and poetic
ineffability into a strand o f dialogue subsumed by the Modernist impulse towards authenticity and selfawareness through an oscillating engagement with material culture and obsession with the urban sphere.
Another significant aspect to the Victorian poetic dilemma, lay in finding ways to carve out a place for
poetry in the contested space o f literature and art, with emerging forms o f popular expression, such as the
novel and cinema. While Altieri’s interpretation makes the Victorian lyric into a damsel in distress rescued
by the striking aesthetics o f Modern poetry, I think a more nuanced way to understand the relationship
would be to return to Eliot’s notion of evolving poetry.
As I suggest earlier, I see the Victorian lyrics functioning as film negatives that Eliot takes into the
dark room and inverses, distorts, blows up, collages and ultimately develops into something new. In
addition to realizing he can use the material of being adolescent in the Modern urban world, I would assert
that Eliot also realizes he can develop his voice through rebellious engagement with the Victorian poetry of
his childhood. On a meta-narrative level, "Prufrock" is a poem about Victorian poetry coming of age, it is a
development, not simply a dismissive or extreme departure. Victorianism and Romanticism, like French
Symbolism, hover on the cusp o f the twentieth century and begins to address the tensions between the self
and the Modern world, yet remain structured on what is lost, whereas Eliot pushes Modernism to be beyond
this established point o f cultural decline in the face of urbanization, to be about what can be found in the
rubble o f cultural decay. Cultural decay becomes an assumed extant reality, rather than an obsession with
exposing this failure and presenting an escape from suffering, Eliot focuses on the disrupting, contesting
and challenging established Romantic and Victorian aesthetics by tapping into emerging young, Modern
self-consciousness and modes o f technology and popular expression that speak to the future world.
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Eliot thus aims to make conscious meaning out of this repressed Victorian fear of meaninglessness
trembling in the face o f modernity; his poetry seeks to overcome a sensation of alienation and an
apprehension o f the horror o f a buried life. By this buried life I refer to an abstract body, referencing a
multitude o f experiences o f interior intractability, baptized into a phrase by Arnold’s 1852, “The Buried
Life:”
“But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din o f strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge o f our buried life” (45-48).
It is easy to leap at Arnold's suggestion o f the "buried life" as one o f the first sparks of Modernism, of an
allusion to self-awareness o f repressed self, that Eliot would later develop in characters such as Prufrock
and the Lady in "Portrait o f a Lady" (Arnold, 24). As Eliot's Lady refers directly to her "buried life," critic
David Roper reads these lines as Eliot alluding to Arnold in order to call attention to the way Eliot will
unbury this life and go beyond psychology to a larger apparatus of experience, a modern sensibility of
consciousness through a young adult identity, repulsed by this sad woman suppressing knowledge, for the
sake o f feeling (Eliot, 10 and Roper, 49 and 55). In both "Portrait o f a Lady" and "Prufrock" we see a
depiction o f surroundings that reflect and reveal the young narrator’s thoughts, many of which indicate an
investment in issues o f age and intimacy.
I follow Roper’s approach to "Portrait o f a Lady," which dismisses a large body o f previous
criticism that focused on nailing down the woman as one Miss Adeline Mofatt, or reading the poem as a
biographical story o f Eliot’s romantic liaisons with a specific woman (42-45). Thus, "Portrait o f a Lady"
emerges not so much a memoir o f the possibility o f romance with a particular woman, but more about
Eliot’s interest in issues o f intimacy and engagement with the world, which he stages through this persona
in order to develop a Modern poetics. I do not intend to collapse the narrators o f "Prufrock" and "Portrait of
a Lady," but rather to compare how Eliot develops his poetic structure in both poems and how the parallels
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between the narrators reinforce my argument that Prufrock is a teenager. Both poems assert a male
adolescent narrator as the voice of Modernity, who can undermine Romantic sensibility with an overriding
sense of authenticity and irony. In both poems, Eliot dramatizes consciousness laid bare and this
transparency creates a level o f genuineness and intimacy with the reader; this establishes a conversation
with the reader through open-ended questions and revealing thoughts that are withheld from the other
characters in the poem and this level of trust and intimacy elicits the reader's alignment with the speaker
and investment in this style o f poetry.
Essentially, with these poems, Eliot utilizes teenaged personas to speak in a Modern way and
consequently invites the reader to join this sense o f being cutting edge, young, incisive and Modern,
showing the reader how to engage with the world and interpret experience through an ironic, disillusioned
sensibility. Again, by selecting an adolescent persona, Eliot symbolically chooses a Modernly produced
identity to establish an authentic speaking voice from the forefront of the present. The narrators of both
“Portrait o f a Lady” and “Prufrock” present themselves to us as speaking from a psychically conflicted
temporal space, restless and uncomfortable in their skin, as they shift between youthful desires and an
elitist sense o f timeless, exhausted, jaded wisdom. In "Portrait of a Lady," the Lady tells the narrator who is
spurning her affection, that "youth is cruel, and has no remorse / and smiles at situations it cannot foresee,"
and these line flirt with the conclusion wherein the narrator fantasizes the lady's death, his lips
uncontrollably curling up into a wry smile (48-50). The narrator's youthful sensibility is shown in direct
contrast to the Lady's Romantic sensibility, signaled by her aversion to the narrator's lack of remorse and
passion for Chopin, as I previously discussed along with the woman in "Conversation Galante." Thus, Eliot
shows youth to be defined as anti-romantic, liberating itself from the juggernaut o f regret, by undermining
all sincerity with an overriding sensibility o f twisted humor and brazen irony.
The guileless quality o f the narrator, as he transparently opens up his mind, establishes a type of
intimacy with the reader, where we might find it hard to not mock the Lady and live vicariously through
this vicious vision o f the Lady's death. Any hints o f youthful naivete in this unabashed honesty, ultimately
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become eradicated by the overriding tones o f dark cynicism and brazen superiority, so that the overall
effect is one o f bold authenticity and acute awareness. Furthermore, though the narrator o f "Portrait of a
Lady," asks us, as readers, if he "should have the right to smile," he does not wait for our response (124).
Just as the narrator thwarts the Lady's demands for him to write to her, he does not need our approval to act.
Our trust is not undermined by this turn, but rather reinforced, for if the speaker does not seek our approval,
then we can surmise he is expressing him self all the more candidly. This play between permission and
propriety places the speaker in a rebellious position; through his insubordination he evades the social
demands o f a dying world, yet vitalizes the relationship between speaker and reader as the locus of
authenticity and play, challenging us to see things differently and take everything with a grain o f salt.
The narrator mentions that his “self-possession flares,” when the Lady asks him to “write," as he is
frustrated by the social civility that demands he lie and promise to write, even though he has absolutely no
desire to write anything to please her (94 and 93). His integrity, his sense o f authentic self expression is
positioned as more valuable than an idealistic notion o f social obligation to provide solace to a lonely,
nostalgic old lady: the poem becomes a meta-narrative of Eliot's poetic priorities and provides a venue in
which to stage his rejection o f past poetic expectations. Strained by social demands and trapped by the
confines o f his obsessive self-possession, he finds solace in an escape to interiority: a literal, physical
severance through “going abroad” and a mental fantasy o f escape through imagining the woman’s demise
(88). The imagined death o f the Lady leaves the narrator, “sitting pen in hand,” “doubtful of what to feel,”
and thus Eliot positions his persona's inability to “relate” to the woman’s feelings, this most unpoetic
moment o f social discomfort and adolescent rebellion, as the material for poetry (116 and 118). The Lady
gathers together a multiplicity o f associations from which Eliot seeks to dramatize his difference; she
stands for bourgeoisie taste in the form o f feminized romantic longing and sorrow for something already
lost. Thus, through recalling Arnold’s verse, Eliot's "Portrait of Lady" performs exodus from Victorianism
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and Romanticism; for the narrator smiles at the death of the Lady, relieved from the burden to speak in the
terms, tones and texture o f past poetic paradigms.
With the death o f the Lady in mind, let us look again at the death of Prufrock. Besides the vague
Romantic nature o f the reference to mermaids at the end of "Prufrock," Moody points out the connection to
Arnold’s "The Forsaken Merman," believing Eliot alludes to this poem as a further means o f demonstrating
the failure o f Romanticism through mocking Prufrock’s self-elegy (36). Sultan also reads this scene as Eliot
utilizing the mermaids to attest to the failure o f Romanticism to provide any forward movement in poetry
and to be a frozen moment o f solace forever stuck in the past. Sultan considers Eliot to be ironically
engaging with Romantic and Victorian era poetry, dragging it to a bitter end, abandoning it by the sea
through “exploiting” the tropes and showing them to be empty and exhausted shells o f mean ing (80). For
Eliot, the subterranean subtext belied by the emptiness o f the parallel images o f the sea o f Prufrock the crab
and Prufrock at the shore waiting for the mermaids to sing to him, raise questions o f what is meaningful in
life and what it means to exist as a consciousness.
Each time Eliot enacts rapid movements from horrified youth to resigned old man, and from life to
death, the reader realizes it is not certain what mode of experience is worse: to be young and too aware, or
to be old with dulled senses; to be alive but feel dead, or to be dead to any desire for life. Seeing Prufrock
multiply him self through these polymorphous selves, in a constant state of psychic unrest thwarting stasis
at every turn, leads to a reading in which he drowns the Romantic version o f him self stuck in a moment of
nostalgia for the past sorrowful reverie. Just as the mermaids reject him, Prufrock rejects the self that longs
for the mermaids to sing to him. Prufrock kills off this weak, melancholic self, this self stuck in a moment
o f longing for consummation with Romanticism, that cannot survive the onslaught o f Modern demands for
ironic tones, authentic meaning and direct relation to the world. Shedding this Romantic self like a snake
sheds his skin, Prufrock emerges hissing the formula o f Modern poetry.
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As Moody observes, that Prufrock’s “love song should turn out an elegy for him self is very much
in the spirit o f the age o f Arnold, and o f Tennyson. What was lacking [in Victorian poetry] was the ability
to turn to account either the modern world or the unsatisfied longing for another. The one might be unreal
and meaningless, yet it still oppresses; and while the finer feelings only go into escapist forms they confirm
its power” (36). In this Victorian paradigm, the desire for escapism or the fantasy o f a rich buried life, gives
power to the oppressor: the oppressor is both the sorrow o f the real world’s inability to live up to this
dream and the dream itself, remaining forever aloof gaining in power through continuously denying
meaning to the real world. The fantasy is forever positioned as another place and collapses in on itself as it
becomes so inflated with idealism that it is empty o f existence and meaning; simultaneously, the fantasy
empties the world o f real meaning and inflates it with false meaning. Over time, the fantasy comes to
represent the failure o f the world and both the dream and the reality empty each other of meaning. Thus a
binary between the dream and the real world emerges and the obsession with a meaningless world of
simulacra exacerbates the sensation o f cultural failure to recover true meaning and the lack of artistic
expression capable o f elevating humanity. Arnold is ruled by the dream and longs to rule over it, not to be
free from it. In poems such as "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse," he seeks to regain the reigns and cajole
the dream into speaking through the ritual o f poetic conjuring.
Arnold’s “dead tim e’s exploded dream" becomes concretely manifest in "Prufrock" through Eliot's
portrayal o f the world o f lingering fog, dust, unfinished business and unasked questions (98). The dream of
something else, o f a better or richer world kills the version of Prufrock longing for it; he is rejected by the
dream, the mermaids do not sing to him, so through Prufrock's death, Eliot renunciates the dream, leaving it
at the bottom o f the sea, contained in the Prufruckian self who failed to see beyond the limitations o f the
dream to provide vital meaning and catharsis in a complex, chaotic Modern world. The dream does not
speak to Prufrock so he kills the version of him self seeking to engage with this Romantic vision, enacting
Eliot's push to liberate poetry from being beholden to a dead dream of past civilization. Critic John Kwan-
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Terry provides a compelling insight into Eliot’s process o f renunciation and while this becomes a
specifically Christian process in Eliot’s later work, we can see Kwan-Terry’s perceived pattern in Eliot’s
earlier works as a poetic trope. Kwan-Terry defines renunciation for Eliot as “an understanding o f what his
worldly desire actually is for,” and in ’’Prufrock” his desire for the dream is eclipsed by his desire to escape
the dream (137). I would argue that the melodramatic horror o f being beholden to a dead dream is precisely
the subject matter Eliot develops out of Arnold. Eliot almost rewrites Arnold in order to provide an
alternative ending so that Eliot can register a beginning; this is exactly what Altieri intimates as the failure
o f the Victorian lyric as the context for Modernism.
Eliot thus supplants the Romantic hero who clings to his faith in this dream, with the modern
voice o f power o f the poet to speak authentically to Modern consciousness and the fragmentation o f the
mind through the increasing complexity o f experience. The Romantic Prufrock self equates waking with
drowning, indicating that he has become so acclimated to a pattern o f nightmarish spectatorship that he
would not survive in a world dictated by his actions and can only function in the world predicated on his
hesitations. Dying stands as a new form o f birth, for by deconstructing old modes o f poetic expression and
collecting the best parts into new wholes, a new voice will speak to the surface somethingness and the
subterranean nothingness and the consciousness of past, present and future. As Moody observes, Eliot
shifts the lyrical paradigm from Victorian and Romantic modes, “not by escaping from experience into
anything else, but by so intensifying it that its particulars yielded its universal meaning” (Moody, 30). This
process renounces the Victorian apprehension o f the world as a false image o f reality, or as failing to
measure up to some cultural and personal vision, by depositing value in the authenticity o f expression, the
immediacy o f thoughts and new experience as both strange and timeless. A teenaged person is Eliot's
objective correlative to this idea o f a re-birth through awareness and the need to reckon with the changed,
present world.
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As I have already touched upon, Eliot’s poetic mechanism o f the objective correlative becomes
crucial to identifying exactly what Eliot tries to develop from the Romantics and Victorians. A helpful way
o f describing Eliot’s objective correlative is as a process o f mirroring or filming; the objects of Prufrock’s
world that he shows us provide a mirror for him to see him self and a film to show us what he sees.
According to Eliot, he seeks to unleash “a set o f objects, a situation, a chain o f events which shall be the
formula o f that particular emotion,” so that the reader engages with feelings beyond easy articulation (48).
For example, Prufrock bemoans, “I should have been a pair o f ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of
silent seas,” which expresses a powerful desire for negation of consciousness; this image contains a longing
to be a mechanism o f survival, removed from thought and the imperatives o f human social graces or
socially constructed gender roles (73-74). Sociologist Jeffrey Turner points out that during the early 1900s,
the era o f Eliot’s teen years, the pervasive “preconception o f how one should behave in a social setting”
would dictate that the man should “initiate courtship behaviors” and “sexual intimacy” (5). Turner looks to
the way “cultural role scripts were distilled,” as a set o f expectations, such as Emily Post’s etiquette books,
where she instructs: “in public places men do not jum p up for every strange woman who happen to
approach," however, "if any woman addresses a remark to him, a gentleman at once rises to his feet as he
answers her” (Post as qtd. in Turner, 6). Prufrock speaks to his failure to live up to these cultural scripts by
his inability to speak and his desire to accost anonymous women walking the street at night. Haunted by
smells; too timid to hunt, Prufrock longs to just be reflex without thought, an automaton programmed for
survival.
As American “urban populations swelled,” at the turn of the century, an “influx of immigration”
brought more and more cultures into close contact and women increasingly joined the work force, gender
roles, especially in terms o f young adult courtship, became a more contested space and "Prufrock" speaks
to these cultural shifts and gender pressures (Turner, 5). As a teenager experiencing the pressure of asking a
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girl out, Prufrock cannot fulfill gender expectations and thus engages in a process o f expressing his sense of
demasculization through referencing his baldness and his inability to “eat a peach” (122). No doubt Eliot
felt the pressure o f this social norm and while I am not proposing an autobiographical reading, this cultural
context leads me to suggest that Prufrock speaks as a young man acutely fearful of social gender
expectations, not a middle-aged man who is already settled into life.
Prufrock expresses discomfort with a socially constructed notion of identity and gender, which
significantly relates to post-modern gender theories o f Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on the subject.
This connection offers another level o f textuality engendering dialogue with future generations through
opening dialogue on an important Modern topic. As critic Raya Morag describes, “Foucault’s view of
m asculinity” is as a “discourse o f power, with an emphasis on power(lessness),” a concept in "Prufrock”
that remains an evocative cultural narrative (27). The emphasis on Prufrock’s sensation o f powerlessness
begins at the start o f the poem with his tone o f passive resignation to make the visit; this tone is then
reiterated by the “ehterised” sky, the thought of “restless nights,” and the fear o f some “overwhelming
question” that might be put to him (3, 6 and 10). The lingering nature o f the “question...” emphasized by
the ellipses that follow Prufrock’s first mention o f this inquiry, persists in different unasked questions and
unanswered uncertainties throughout the poem, creating a miasma of doubt that permeates the atmosphere
(94).
Prufrock systematically avoids this original question, yet its presence continually seeps out
throughout the poem in gradually increasing specificity, from “do I dare,” in the sixth stanza to the final
question in the eighteenth, “dare I eat a peach” (38 and 122). The sexual innuendo of the peach condenses
the process o f the question raising its head at the aporia o f intimacy with women. The question therefore
becomes a poetic mechanism registering Prufrock’s masculine sensation of powerlessness. Doubting his
masculine authority in the human world, Prufrock zoomorphizes his identity in the face of woman, hinting
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at some subterranean animal nature that lurks under the surface o f civility. An insect “formulated, sprawling
on a pin,” his sensation o f powerlessness forms the refrain o f his narrative of masculine experience (57).
The conflict o f experience with cultural expectations arises through engagement with women. This
objective correlative of a “ragged claws” speaks to Prufrock’s fear o f failure as a human through double
synecdoche: not only is he this reptilian creature, this creature is just “ragged claws” “scuttling across the
floor o f silent seas” (73-74). He fantasizes the liberation o f reducing him self to a mechanism of mindless
survival, which also forms an objective correlative to sex.
Importantly, the narrator arrives at this abstraction after being confronted with possibility of
speaking to a woman, whom he synecdoches into a scent. Thus violence enacted by the narrator towards
women in poetically tearing their body into parts, “the arm s...(dow ned with light brown hair!),” ultimately
forms an objective correlative to the way these women make him feel (63-64). In the case of the arms, the
hair makes him aware o f his own desires and repulsion at the animal nature o f lust. The hair also recalls his
horror at the thought of balding which indicates that hairiness is next to manliness, so through this
connection, women assume an aggressive powerful role, making his hair disappear and appear on their
arms, a sign o f sexual power and dominance. Prufrock expresses that he does not know how to approach
women except through hidden glimpses and backward glances expressed by the “shawls” and “perfume
from a dress” (67 and 65). Immediately his inability to speak to this synecdoche of woman incites
apprehension o f being lonely in old age, which he projects as “the lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out
o f windows” (72). All o f these male and female images tear the body into surface parts and articles of
clothing that perform and fulfill gender role expectations. Eventually transformed into a reptilian sea
creature, Prufrock the crab can mate without thought and survive without the need for forced
companionship or conversation.
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We have to wonder if Prufrock’s over-identification with otherness, from the “lonely men” to these
“ragged claws,” indicates crisis, rebellion or escape and I would argue it expresses all of these (72 and 73).
By destabilizing boundaries between youth and old age and between animalia and humanity, Prufrock
articulates his adolescent discomfort in his own skin and complicates the notion of stable identity, exposing
the failure o f cultural scripts to explain and contain experience. Through giving a physicality to gendered
experience outside the realm o f normative cultural narratives, Prufrock not only speaks to alternative types
o f being, he embodies and contests normative gender and age expectations through his presence. Opening
up discourse on socially constructed gender and the experience o f non-normative identity struggling to play
dress up to perform a culturally subscribed role, Prufrock’s anxieties will later find consonance in post­
modern identity theory. For example, Butler’s seminal work, The Psychic Life o f Power: Theories in
Subjection, emphasizes the instability and irrationality of a totalizing identity; incorporating the terms of
both materialized ideology and psychoanalytic psychic subject formation. Prufrock’s rejection of certain
norms or modes o f behavior such as having tea or talking of Michelangelo, activities that are coded in class
and gender, is part of a journey through the meandering streets o f psychoanalytic subject formation and
identity demarcation.
In her work, Butler emphasizes the psychoanalytic point that ego forms through rejections and
through loss o f otherness; Eliot’s objective correlatives demonstrate how Prufrock substitutes otherness to
alleviate the pressure o f trying to reconcile some sense of core self with the self he must perform. In order
to be acknowledged by the world, Prufrock must perform a cohesive identity and maintain this performance
while being pushed through the compressor o f social rituals, so that he can emerge as a named being:
demarcated and contained by his gender signature. Thus, Prufrock's identity forms through the context of
genderization; in fact, as critic Chris Buttram Trombold provides us in his research, the poem's "draft form
bears the parenthetical title "(Prufrock Among the Women)," which implies that Prufrock's relationship to
his milieu forms and informs his identity, in a complex chain reaction of interchanging identifications and
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rejections (95). In addition, this suggests that Prufrock must actively draw boundaries to cordon off and
maintain an ego or identity, for otherwise he might be perceived as one o f the women, unless he structures
his identity aggressively against this female atmosphere. Yet, in both "Prufrock," and "Portrait of a Lady,"
the women keep oozing into his masculine consciousness and demanding him to align with their needs and
to fulfill their expectation o f who is gendered self should be. That is to say, the more Prufrock tries to assert
his masculine difference, the more women pull down his attempts to erect restrictions and quickly trap him
with his own limitations, and the more and more obligated he becomes to meet female expectations and
pass female examination in order to escape from their restraints, restrictions and demands.
Fulfilling gender expectations therefore emerges as a type o f foreplay mandated by socially
prescribed norms and Prufrock falters with anxiety at the idea of measuring up to the social construct of
masculinity. That Prufrock presumably has male sexual anatomy, but fails to measure up to the social
expectations o f the male gender role, demonstrates Butler’s concept of gender as a social construct and
Foucault’s notion o f masculinity as a narrative of power and powerlessness. Prufrock feels powerless to
move beyond the prelude to sexual engagement, for the pressure of female expectations puts any desires he
might have on ice; Prufrock therefore feels conflicted due to the disparity between what is expected and
what he feels and experiences. As I have previously discussed, by inhabiting the space o f identity anomaly
by proxy o f his age, Prufrock experiences the burden of social investments in what a teenager becoming a
man should be. The inability o f his teenaged years to fit into an established category o f childhood or
adulthood mirrors the expression o f his conflicted gender identity, impotent in the face of adult masculinity.
Castrated and feminized by the aggressive, permeating female presence, Prufrock's confusion o f temporal
existence is further exacerbated by his attempt to establish gender difference outside of social expectation
and he therefore ends up drowning amongst the women.
Prufrock’s experience o f what it feels like to be a male does not fit into culturally prescribed
gender roles or expectations and his concern with his powerlessness in the face of sexual opportunity is
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both teenaged and Modern. His narrative of rebellion against what would be expected from a masculine
speaking voice stems from the lack o f consecrated wisdom or insight, the openness o f dialogue discussing
his experience o f inadequacy and the portrayal of the female gender as sexually aggressive and repulsive.
Prufrock’s powerlessness stems not just from a basic discomfort with the opposite sex, but from a deeper
insecurity with his identity as being at odds with concepts o f masculinity. Prufrock therefore seeks to
control this anxiety through exposing the socially constructed nature o f gender, showcasing gender's
inability to contain or express his identity or to control the women and keep them on their side of the
binary. Eliot’s process o f undermining cultural expectations through the projection of a teenaged male
consciousness, which defies both gender and age, produces a viable narrative to articulate rapidly changing
modern life.
I think reading Prufrock’s identity as fugitive provides an excellent condensation of what makes it
so evocatively Modern; Prufrock’s identity is in a constant state of running from containment, rules and
consequences; as Prufrock avoids questions as if accused of some horrid crime he cannot admit, you
wonder at what point he will ask for his attorney. Prufrock’s fugitive identity attempts to escape
imprisonment in a socially constructed gender or age role and by fleeing its socially constructed self, it only
finds itself as abandoned corners o f thought rear up through Eliot’s mechanism o f objective correlative.
With images such as the “yellow fog that rubs its back on the window panes, licked its tongue into the
corners o f the evening,” Prufrock expresses his desire to taste what lies beyond the edge, to develop a palate
for the future (16-17). Thus, Modernity seeks to express the gray area, the runaway thoughts that pull the
edges o f consciousness into frightening and uncertain frontiers in order to escape the stasis o f being caught
in the headlights o f a binary between what is expected and what one feels.
Modernity, the outlaw, provides a renegade dialectic between past crimes and future punishment,
through seeking to operate outside boundaries and find freedom through changing the laws. For example,
running from social obligations that would fulfill his gender role, Prufrock deconstructs his own body and
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escapes the cultural rules o f gender and sex through fantasizing his alternative identity as an automaton
crab at the bottom o f the sea. Prufrock suggests he has the rest o f his life to “prepare a face to meet the
faces” he will meet and then leaps to also having “time to murder and create” (27 and 28). Such a transition
is not arbitrary; for, Prufrock implies that every time we enter the world we murder one version of our self
and create another one in an endless Sisyphean cycle o f never overcoming the obstacle o f social
expectation in the Herculean task of creating a cohesive self. Prufrock’s conflict emerges as his inability to
be who society wants, and yet his unnerving fear that society will not accept him for who he thinks he
might be: the mermaids will not sing to him regardless of how he rolls his trousers, in other words,
regardless o f who he pretends to, tries to, or might really be.
Prufrock’s conceit o f displacing his lack of a socially intelligible identity with the metonymic
presence o f physical objects, not only forms part o f Eliot’s poetic agenda, but also emerges as metaphor for
Prufrock’s coming o f age narrative. Sliding down a slippery slope of deconstructing his identity in order to
form it, Prufrock’s repeated attempt to articulate the specific somethingness of his self through the show
and tell o f otherness, reflects his extreme fear o f having no control over who he is and who he is expected
to be. Identity becomes dialectic between socially expressive self and inexpressive inner self and
"Prufrock" narrates the sensation o f identity formation as the accumulation of otherness into the vessel o f a
singular body and onto the screen of a singular consciousness. The naked authenticity o f this teenaged mind
capable of fugitive, criminal thoughts spawned by his struggle with self-formation on the fringes, provides
Eliot a mechanism for this study in presenting Modern consciousness. Eliot shows Prufrock engaging in
active self-representation, attempting to reclaim control over the contested site of his identity; there is a
power in his expression o f powerlessness for he exposes his weakness, powerlessness, inadequacy and
anxiety in the face o f social constructs and expectations for teenaged masculinity on the brink o f adulthood.
Prufrock is very engaged in showing how disengaged he is and this complex irony contributes to the rich
texture o f Eliot’s voice as both inside and outside his permeable narrator. Thus, Eliot picks up Arnold’s
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sensation o f walking between two words and develops this consciousness to be born again through
Prufrock, the modern teenager.
V.
The Song o f Powerless Prufrock
“I was happy in the haze o f a drunken hour
But Heaven knows, I’m miserable now
I was looking for a job and then I found a job
And Heaven knows, I’m miserable now
In my life, why do I give valuable time
To people who don’t care if I live or die?” (The Smiths, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable N ow .”)
Now, let us delve deeper into a close reading of ’'Prufrock” to see Eliot’s poetic techniques at work
in more precise detail. Eliot's theoretical focus upon direct engagement with the reader becomes instantly
transparent; consider the unforgettable first three lines:
“Let us go then you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized on a table” (1-3).
Immediately, a confusion o f pronouns arises around the uncertain intentions of the speaker: does the “you”
refer to himself, the reader, to a real or imagined companion, or to all of these. This confusion of address
introduces the reader to an atmosphere o f hesitation and further insinuates the reader into this plot of
vacillation through layering a readerly question on top o f the questions posed by the narrative. As critic
James C. Haba eloquently suggests, “the peculiar beauty o f this poem" might be that "our hesitations and
reservations,” as the reader not certain if Prufrock is speaking to us, “exceed his [Prufrock’s] hesitations and
reservations” (55). The long-standing critical debate regarding whether or not Prufrock is addressing the
reader as the “you,” sets the mood of ambiguity and tone o f indecision that will dominate the poem.
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To find answers to the question of address, let us consider how Eliot recommends readers should
approach poetry. Eliot quickly simplifies his discussion, stating "poetry attempts to convey something
beyond what can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another”
(Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, 23). The notion that poetry is ultimately one person in conversation with
another seems straightforward. Yet applying this focus to Prufrock raises more questions than it provides
clear answers. We can never really be sure if the conversation is between the speaker and the reader, or the
speaker and a companion in the poem, or the speaker and himself. The multiplicity o f relationships
suggested by the ambiguously directed narrative voice calls our attention to the complexity of selfhood,
wherein the self finds definition through a series of rejections and connections with otherness as I discussed
in the previous section o f this paper. Thus, the confusion introduced by the opening lines alludes to a
collection o f possible relationships, to self and to others, that define an I. In the poem's initial moment of
uncertainty, I would argue that the reader is naturally incorporated into the poem; the ambivalent "you"
poses as an irresistible call, functioning as a hook to pull the reader in with the promise of intimacy though
invitation or eavesdropping.
Undermining any protocol o f a clear address or the social grace o f a politely affable one,
Prufrock’s passive resignation o f the “let us go,” mirrors the larger destabilization of poetic expectation as
any readerly anticipation o f a lovely evening sky becomes transmorphed into the grotesque sensation of
being “spread out like a patient etherized on a table" (1 and 3-4). The reader at this point realizes we are
about to embark on a walk with possibly the most miserable human being on earth. Before we even have a
chance to catch our breath, Prufrock tells us not to ask the question that is apparently forming so
transparently on our lips. This question is significantly positioned at the end o f the first stanza to formally
present itself as interrupting the evening stroll; the break in verse replicates the abrupt disruption and
emulates the attempt to turn the conversation away from the question. The subsequent ellipsis highlight the
narrator’s impotent balking in the face of this query as the passive act of leaving something lingering. This
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abandoned question therefore hangs like a threat over the following stanzas, mirroring and exacerbating the
foreboding and hesitating atmosphere of the poem.
The “certain half-deserted streets... that follow like a tedious argument o f insidious intent,”
replicate the labyrinthine mind o f the narrator, who continuously finds physical manifestation of his mental
sensations in his surroundings (4-8). Unpacking the complex relationships constructed in this line, let us
focus on the parallel between physical and mental sensations. A half-deserted street physically manifests
the tedious argument and these two concepts become further linked through a shared feeling of insidious
intent. According to the OED, insidious means “full o f wiles or plots, lying in wait or seeking to entrap or
ensnare...sly, treacherous, deceitful, underhand, artful, cunning,” and we see how all of Prufrock’s urban
wanderings and interactions with other mutually reinforce this sense of entrapment. Prufrock’s substitution
o f his surroundings for answers to questions regarding his mental state puts into practice Eliot’s poetic
mechanism o f the objective correlativa. In addition, this pattern begs the question of if Prufrock is the
product o f his environment, or if his environment is ultimately narrated and only exists as the product o f his
deranged subjectivity.
Prufrock’s projections simultaneously dictate his relationship to his environment and stem from
his interactions with the space and this pattern of co-dependency complicates any clear objective reality
with a latent tension between personal experience and observable actuality. The narrator’s conceptions and
interactions with space reveal his interior thoughts as we witness Eliot patterning expression as a process of
exteriorizing the internal. Through a plot energized by the fluidity of time, Eliot utilizes non-linear
narrativity as an essential path toward connecting the physical with the metaphysical in experience. Seeing
time as fluid necessitates conceptualizing time as an overlapping and interweaving texture, full of
sensation, desire, and movement. The complexity of interwoven sensory input becomes poetically
transposed through Eliot’s anaphoric communications. As Eliot explicates, "when a poet’s mind is perfectly
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equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary’s experience is
chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have
nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the
poet these experiences are always forming new wholes” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 247). Eliot therefore
seeks to emulate authentic experience as the sense o f being continuously mirrored and represented by one's
environment. Translating the thought process underlying identity formation through Prufrock's ontological
quest, Eliot exposes the self as structured through reflections and external representations.
The gradations o f drama and apathy present in the visions o f adolescent Prufrock enable Eliot to
work towards flexible verse that enables the reader to feel the narrator’s “thought as immediately as the
odour o f a rose” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 247). This process constitutes precisely what Eliot finds
powerful in a metaphysical sensibility that can devour all experience. Eliot engages anaphoric and nuanced
thought processes through his use o f sensory collusions, such as sounds that seem like smells or visions that
become described through physical sensations. For example, Prufrock calls the night a “patient etherised on
a table,” and in this concise metaphor he transmutes a visual observation into a sensation o f numbness (3).
The anaphoric referral to the night parallels the narrator’s own sensations, adding to the poem's dense
atmosphere o f overlaps and identifications with otherness by finding humanity expressed through inhuman
images. Such connections destabilize assumptions o f what it means to be human, engaging in dialogues of
modern identity: what will become o f the individual and o f civilization in a modern urban world.
We cannot help but notice that the world of the poem exists solely as an extension of Prufrock’s
endless self-referentiality. Prufrock's ambivalence largely stems from his acute awareness o f temporal
fluidity, o f each moment spilling from the past into the future, and his identity as oozing into his past,
present and future representations o f himself. The way the narrator plays with time demonstrates his lack of
respect for temporal boundaries and his own experience in a temporal netherworld between youth and
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adulthood. Prufrock has no sense o f needing to seize the day since, for him, the room “where women come
and go ,” forever “talking o f M ichelangelo,” embodies a sense o f the same scene repeating, the death spasm
o f some Arnoldian exploded universe (13 and 14). Prufrock compartmentalizes these women as sealed
temporal anomaly that has always existed and will always exist in order to keep it separate from his own
trajectory o f forward moving existence; he therefore fantasizes about controlling his future by not going to
this room o f stasis and associates women with spaces tainted by the sequestered comforts of the past.
Society, and the intimacy o f others, is thus represented as a segregated area Prufrock wishes to avoid for it
is a trap that keeps one from moving forward. Prufrock therefore uses gender as a demarcation o f a
boundary, a room to which he begrudgingly must go, a distracting perfume that he wants to ignore, or the
underwater maidens who will not answer. Clearly, not only is gender a boundary, it forms a boundary
ridden with anxiety and crossing the threshold is never actually achieved. Prufrock never enters this room,
never follows the perfume and never merges with the sea girls; his desires and fears are constantly deferred.
On another level, by juxtaposing his own aesthetic vision that looks outside to the modern urban
setting, rather then into the classical canons of art appreciation, Prufrock positions his youthful, modern,
masculine difference as exerting control and power over space and time. Eliot's choice o f referring to
M ichelangelo seems like a placeholder at first mention, representing any widely appreciated European
artist and also a convenient rhyme with the word "go" (13). However, Michelangelo's most famous work,
"David," which is suggested by the artists name alone and we can surmise whatever statue on display might
be reminiscent this glorified perfection o f male form worshipped in marble. Part o f Prufrock’s discomfort
with the visit might actually be the overt sexual desire expressed by the women’s scopic ogling of a naked
man, especially in contrast to Prufrock's own awkwardness with nudity and the human form. Perhaps
Michelangelo stands as a synecdoche for aesthetics that glorify classical beauty, specifically man’s
muscular form and strength, which makes Prufrock feel inadequate and Eliot feel nothing. For Eliot’s
interest lies in m en’s flaws, insecurities and hesitations. Prufrock’s departure from the room marks Eliot’s
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aesthetic departure from art appreciation and cultural paradigm that fantasizes unified identity. Like the
narrator o f "Conversation Galante," Prufrock pushes the romantic semblance and assumptions of art into
another, feminized room which he enters only for the sake of enacting an exit, providing an objective
correlative for his departure.
If these women are engaged in the present only through repetition o f the past, Prufrock continually
pushes into the future, even if only through macabre moments o f fast-forward, utilizing the principle of
metonymy to make any sense at all: “I have measured my life out in coffee spoons” (51). Yet these are not
actual actions, just cinematographic images for the movie o f his life he imagines. Prufrock seems weighed
down by the burden o f too much time; this weight in turn exacerbates his doubt, confusion, and inability to
know exactly what to say, as he finds him self at the end of youth and the brink o f maturity. A nearness to
old age is approximated in the space of the poem through Prufrock’s metaphoric visioning connecting the
present to the future. Through metonymic increments, such as the aforementioned spoons o f coffee,
Prufrock shrinks the imagined space between youth and old age, metaphorically wrapping universe into a
ball. Thus, Eliot uses metonymic displacements o f metaphor in order to justify the juxtaposition of
temporalities contained within authentic, everyday consciousness that cause the speaker to balk before an
easy escape into romantic metaphoric approximations.
For example, Eliot does not express through metaphor that women stand as an alternate
temporality embodying stasis, but instead he presents this experientially, as images cropping up in
Prufrock’s consciousness. Eliot's use of these other rooms and spaces where women exist to enact what
literary critic and linguistic theorist Patricia Parker calls a “productive shift between far and near” (149).
Eliot depicts space that is presented as real and physical in order to speak to the sensation of boundaries and
to embody space that is temporal. In order to give readers a sense of these moments as being Prufrock's real
experience, Eliot utilizes metonymy, rather than bold metaphoric leaps that might suggest Romantic
hyperbole or aesthetic melodrama. As "Prufrock" becomes increasingly allusive and the temporal stretches
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become larger, the metonymic principle can no longer be sustained and artistic demands for metaphoric
satisfaction usurp the narrative, pushing Prufrock to his necessary death as metaphor for the death o f the
Romantic self. The larger metaphoric plot o f the poem therefore concerns the nature of reality, which Eliot
localizes as an apt point o f inquiry into individual and cultural consciousness through the persona of
Prufrock.
In addition to ritualistically enacting departure from Romanticism and a new birth into Modernity
through Prufrock's identity quest, Eliot also works to build meaning back into the language and experience
o f the dirty, everyday world that common people experienced, rather than some fantasy world artists
imagine. Through insistence on the potential o f metonymy to imbue the world with meaning and reinvigorate the mind with engagement in the present, I see Eliot working to overcome Victorian anxiety of
simulacrum. The concept o f simulacrum, which gained cultural traction in the 1800s, suggests false
representations supplanting reality, of everything just being a false copy o f some lost original, of objects
lacking substance and o f inadequate signifiers chasing the lost scent of a dead symbol. According to the
OED, the term “simulacra,” came into common usage during the mid-1800s through the works of a variety
o f writers and cultural pundits: philosopher Thomas Carlyle, novelist William Thackeray and art critic
John Ruskin. As the OED summarizes, “simulacra” is “something having merely the form or appearance of
a certain thing, without possessing its substance or proper qualities” and as “a mere image, a specious
imitation or likeness, o f something” this is “an artificial imitation.” These fears o f imitation, inadequate
representation and empty surfaces, dominated aesthetic criticism at the time o f Eliot's birth in the Victorian
Era.
As Art Historian Linda Merrill indicates, art critic John Ruskin was a well-published Oxford Slade
Professor o f Fine Art and respected as the British “arbitrator o f taste," during the Victorian Era; Ruskin’s
investment in the concept o f simulacra thus attests to the prevalence o f this paradigm as providing a
meaningful approach to art and reality during the era (71). The concern with proper artistic representation
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weighed heavily on Ruskin as a moral obligation to not deceive the viewer with an inadequate
representation, but instead “recreation will be based on facts, not on formulas or illusions” (Clark, 133).
Ruskin s foundational text Modern Panters defines perfect taste as the capacity o f receiving or enabling
intellectual and moral pleasure from observing nature in its purity and perfection (200-204). By insisting
upon objective vision o f nature’s truth in art, Ruskin provides a critical backbone to the predominate strain
o f Romanticism in 19th century Britain. So if the world of Nature removed from human empiricism holds
the only truth, then the modernizing urban world emerges as false fantasia. Thus, fantasizing that beneath
the surface o f false representation lies a deeper meaning, best mediated through Romantic contemplation of
Nature or realistic artistic expression of Nature, consequently makes personal experience unreliable and
positions modern urban experience as incongruous to true meaning.
Eventually such an intractable depth becomes more real than its manifestation in the world and
this burden o f distance from, and longing for, this abstract original reality eventually cannot withstand the
pull of the present and the changes in cultural needs. By positioning meaning outside of the ephemeral,
surface world, the binary o f simulacra could not contain the personal experience o f a new generation of
young adults who embraced the urban world as an authentic conduit to truth, for it fed so much into their
day to day experience and the past world o f Romantic contemplation of Nature became a dead language of
irrelevant dreams. In response, Eliot’s ’’Prufrock" enacts a poem, or work of art, as an equalizing plane
between subjective and objective reality, between images of nature and images of urban spaces, between
the past and the future and ultimately seeks to redeem simulacra to meaning. In "Prufrock," simulacra is not
defined by its absence o f original veracity or its opposition to stable reality, rather, simulacra is released
from a Victorian binary o f reality and subsumed into a Modern dialectic of authenticity.
This modern dialogue o f a multitude o f realties cohabiting the space of the authentic attests to the
sensation o f a world becoming more and more complex; as Eliot writes “our civilization comprehends great
variety and com plexity...the poet must become more and more comprehensive” (“The Metaphysical Poets,”
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248). For example, when the subterranean world where Prufrock scuttles as isolated crab legs asserts itself
and momentarily supplants the winding urban streets with the bottom o f the sea floor, this analogous
positions both as equally real, equally subjective and equally objective. This parallel between surface and
depth is replicated at the conclusion o f the poem, for we are not sure if Prufrock drowns on earth or at the
bottom o f the sea and furthermore not certain if this death is metaphoric or real. Everything that presents
itself to Prufrock’s consciousness takes on this weight o f reality, which is why he feels “spread out against
the sky,” and shows us his mind as “if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on the screen;” thus, by
visually and viscerally demonstrating the consciousness o f an urban teenager laid bare, Eliot taps into the
present moment o f authentic modern experience (2 and 105).
Another crucial clue to seeing Eliot’s agenda as one of destabilizing assumptions of reality can be
found in the dedication to his friend Jean Verdenal, which Eliot adds to the entire Prufrock and Other
Observations in 1917 (Mayer, 201-202). Eliot's dedicates to Verdenal several lines in Latin from Dante's
The Inferno, lines which he later translates in his 1929 essay on Dante: “‘now can you understand the
quality o f love that warms me towards you, so I forget our vanity and treat the shadows like the solid thing”
(“Dante,” 216). By treating the “shadows like the solid thing,” we can transcend the irreconcilable distance
between fantasy and reality and we are no longer limited by a binary pattern, but rather see how both play
upon consciousness so that both are real (Eliot, “Dante,” 216). Eliot met and became friends with medical
student Verdenal during the year o f 1910 while in Paris and the two explored the intellectual life of the city
together and we can postulate that the two would have discussed the philosophical studies Eliot would have
been engaged at this epoch (Bush). Eliot specifically became deeply invested in “Henri Bergson's
philosophical interest in the progressive evolution o f consciousness” (Bush). Later when Eliot returned to
graduate studies at Harvard in the fall of 1911, he wrote his dissertation on the psychology of
consciousness (Bush). Perl provides a few choice lines from Eliot’s graduate thesis on Bradley, wherein the
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poet asserts, “reality cannot be build solely on fantasy or real material objects” (346). So, rather than a split
between imagined reality and objective reality, or a separation between social reality and personal reality,
Eliot emphasizes the dialectic between the two as continuously recreating what is real (Perl, 346-348).
By reading "Prufrock" as emerging out of the milieu o f Eliot’s 1910-1911 philosophical mindset,
we can see that more than just creating an ambivalent atmosphere, the poet introduces a model wherein
reader and speaker build the meaning o f the poem, and the nature of reality itself, together. For, we as
reader, immediately have to decide if we have been invited into the poem or not, so that we create the
reality as one where Prufrock speaks to us, or he speaks to him self or to another person entirely. Ironically
all these different realities exist in the poem and this trick further confuses any sense o f clear divide
between the world o f the poem and our own world, putting into praxis Eliot’s poetic project of breaking
down the barrier between the poet’s mind and the reader and between experiencing the art o f poetry and the
sensation o f being in the everyday real world. As Eliot writes, experience forms from the “mush of
literature and life” (qtd. in Nicholls, 55). In addition to the stimulus o f philosophy of consciousness, cinema
in the early twentieth century also provided Eliot new ways o f seeing and an emerging art form
problematizing aesthetics. Critic David Trotter reads Eliot’s early poems as utilizing cinematic metaphors
o f lights flickering on the screen; for example, Eliot couches Prufrock’s consciousness in cinematic terms
as “spread out against the sky “as “if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on the screen” (2 and 105).
According to Trotter, in Eliot's letters he expresses interest in, “the emergence of...fully narrative cinema”
that could absorb an “audience into a self-sufficient world unified across time and space;” in this bizarre
dream like floating world o f cinema stemming from reality, yet containing its own reality, Eliot found
perhaps a sensibility capable o f devouring all experience (242).
As Trotter’s essay points out, “there is sufficient scattered reference to the cinema, in Eliot’s letters,
essays, and poems, to suggest an enduring preoccupation, and one o f definite consequences
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for his development as a writer” (237). The cinema’s most powerfully innovative narrative device, the
montage, functions as condensed metonymy-cum-metaphor. As Trotter explains, montage for the most part
“came to be understood as referring either to the combination of two shots in such a way as to generate an
effect or meaning not discernable in either shot alone, or to the sort o f conceptual or rhythmical cutting”
(238). This conceptual and rhythmical cutting is very suggestive o f contrasts and juxtaposition that Eliot
characterizes as the central brilliance in the metaphysical poetry tradition (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 243).
Trotter calls our attention to Eliot’s discussion o f montage technique in “The Metaphysical Poets” (238).
For instance, Eliot describes “some o f Donne’s most successful and characteristic effects are secured by
brief words and sudden contrasts: ‘A braclet o f bright hair above the bone,’ where the most powerful effect
is produced by the sudden contrast o f associations o f ‘bright hair’ and o f ‘bone.’ This telescoping of images
and multiplied associations is characteristic....” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 242-243). Eliot brings this
same conceit o f juxtaposition and a suggestively similar image to "Prufrock" in the image o f “arms that are
braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!”) (63-64). The process
o f zooming in, or changing perspective to illicit excitement o f feeling, thought and sensation through
contrast and tension within one image speaks to the complexity o f viewership that translates into the
terminology o f modern film.
Through these modes o f cinematic viewership, Eliot dramatizes the process o f how our initial
impression o f an image becomes problematized through further examination and contrast, which visually
manifests in a precise manner the way a multiplicity o f realities form an authentic rendering o f the truth. In
the above example from "Prufrock," the movement to contrast arms that appear “bare” in the dark, but then
parenthetically reveal the horror o f “light brown hair” in the lamp light, emulates the process of a camera
lens to zoom and dilate for emphasis with a film crew to further highlight this shocking discovery (63-64).
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U ltimately, this is a means o f translating the intractable authenticity of how we experience seeing and being
in the world through artistic crystallization for heightened awareness o f how consciousness operates. In this
way, Eliot’s theoretical and poetic interest in the potential for authenticity through such a patterning of
experience relates to the material culture of cinema. Eliot’s use o f the techniques o f Metaphysical poets
such as catachresis, juxtaposition and telescopic visioning, makes perfect sense to Modern culture through
the lens o f cinema as an emergent popular art and entertainment form engendering a specific discourse
around reality, viewership and aesthetic technique. The alignment between Eliot’s poetic techniques and a
youthful, emerging art form, positions "Prufrock" as part o f rebellious new forms o f exploring
consciousness and reality.
Trotter points out “the literature o f the period and the cinema o f the period can best be understood
as constituting and constituted by parallel histories,” that is to say, as part of a dialogue regarding how to
translate the world into poetry and how to adapt poetry to a modern sensibility (Trotter, 238). One powerful
way o f representing the world to itself as we experience the acceleration and accumulation of experiences
in the modern city space is through cinema and the cinematic technique o f visual story telling and
condensed narration such as the above discussed montage. Trotter calls upon the critic Michael Wood to
bolster his point “that the ‘principle o f m ontage,’ together with the construction o f imaginary space through
the direction o f the gaze,’ is ‘quintessentially modernist,’” and should thus be focused upon as the most
compelling innovation in 1910s cinema (Trotter, 238). Thus Eliot incorporates this montage technique
along with the possibilities o f voyeurism and viewership in cinema into his conceit of consciousness as a
dramatic space in "Prufrock," wherein projection enables the viewer to explore the functioning o f
consciousness and live vicariously through another’s experience. Trotter specifically sees “the fascination
[Eliot] felt for automatism” in the way Prufrock becomes forced to digress, distracted by sex impulses or
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death wishes, a type o f automatic or instinctual behavior that feels mechanical and uncontrollable, while
objective camera voyeuristically captures these moments, exposing Prufrock’s loss o f control (253).
As part o f his fear o f losing control or being beholden to another, Prufrock avoids female gaze
entirely, more secure as a voyeur, than an object of attention. Prufrock acts like a voyeur in his own world
and a spectator to his own identity and then Eliot intensifies this trope o f viewership by adding the reader as
a voyeur in Prufrock’s consciousness, emulating a cinematic apparatus for the exploration o f viewership
and consciousness. Cinema ultimately offers an artistic model for an all-consuming mechanism of
sensibility and, for this reason, Eliot was interested in its terms, functions and aesthetics. As film theorists
Andre Bazin elaborates o f the photographic image, “‘between the originating object and its reproduction
there intervenes only the instrumentality o f the nonliving agent’” (qtd. in Trotter, 239). So most apropos to
our discussion o f Eliot’s poetics, cinema presented a mechanical device that could consume all experience
and opened up creative space to explore consciousness and reality. Eliot’s found cinema fascinating for it
“‘gives an illusion not o f the stage but of life itse lf” (qtd. in Trotter, 253). The potential to present the
illusion o f life as a narrative reality contained within a screen, yet extending to connect with the outside
world through how this projection plays upon the consumer’s own consciousness, yielded exciting artistic
results. Cinema, and cinematic imagination, opened up new frontiers for imagining our relationship to time,
space, viewership, and identity. Cinematic narratives exploring interiority through external performance
and visual footholds, or objective correlatives for states o f feeling, provided a new, very modern medium,
vocabulary and aesthetic for Eliot to calibrate to poetic expression.
Prufrock thus objectifies his identity so that he too, along with the reader, is a spectator to his
identity. Prufrock must undergo an almost out-of-body experience in order to see and define him self
through exteriorizing his identity into objects. Prufrock needs a mirror to see himself; so he tries to see
him self in objects, mirrored in his surroundings, such as “the yellow fog,” “coffee spoons,” “lonely men in
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shirt sleeves,” and “nerves in patterns on a screen” and though these metonymic connections Prufrock finds
words for his isolation, alienation, lack of cohesive identity and longing for intimacy (15, 51, 72 and 105).
The pattern o f the poem builds the deferred sensual, intellectual and emotional experience o f the secular
dream world o f Prufrock. We grasp at slippages and multiplicities of representation and identity generated
by unstable chronological order and this unstable chronological order is the bread and butter of Modernity.
For, as critic Timothy Mitchell explicates in Questions o f Modernity, the conception o f Modernity emerges
as one where “present is not current experience,” but rather “a present displaced and replayed through the
time lag o f representation” (23). Specifically, Mitchell argues that modern identity forms “a space generated
through representation and replication” (23). Like Marcel Duchamp's 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase,
No. 2, each moment in time creates another image or representation o f self that the internal identity must
then amalgamate, or disown, in conceptualizing itself. These multiple layers o f separation from control
over identity formation engenders a sensation of being trapped in layers o f disembodiment and distance
from identity and leads to anxious questions o f ontology and reality.
To expand M iller’s argument, he reads the poem as an elaboration of a question o f whether this is
real or just a dream. As Miller elaborates, “past, present, and future are equally immediate, and Prufrock is
paralyzed. Like one of Bradley's finite centers, he ‘is not in tim e,’ and ‘contains [his] own past and future’
(KE, 205). Memories, ironic echoes of earlier poetry, present sensations, anticipations o f what he might do
in the future... these are equally present. There is a systematic confusion of tenses and times in the poem, so
that it is difficult to tell if certain images exist in past, present, future” (139-140). M iller’s focus on the
chronological collusions is precisely why I read Prufrock as a teenager, for Prufrock’s identity is the
objective correlative to the sensation o f temporal anomaly. This disruption of linear chronology manifests
Prufrock’s unruly, unstable identity and fluid consciousness that contains all temporal senses. Attempting to
defy the intractability o f the present moment by juxtaposing and montaging time, Prufrock’s angst
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translates into a fraught subjective psychic landscape that eclipses objective time: his consciousness
replaces the clock.
Prufrock’s identity is one between youth and adulthood, and he seems to be having a crisis o f what
to do and how to act in order to not waste the present and the future. Miller essentializes Prufrock’s
constant identity crisis as being demonstrated through his “unhappy relation to time and space” (139). In an
interesting way, "Prufrock" displays tim e’s constant presence as an absence that the narrator seeks to
define: an untouched past, an inaccessible present, and an untenable future. Miller ties time and space to
movement as he raises a compelling point: “One of the puzzles o f the poem is the question as to whether
Prufrock ever leaves his room” as "there is no way to distinguish between actual movement and imaginary
movement” (139). Ultimately, there is no way to differentiate and there is no reason to, and the same goes
for time; for, Prufrock’s representation of experience and identity overwhelms any objective reality. Thus,
through the obsessive repetitions, patterns and anxieties regarding time and self, as excessive or deficient,
we see a marked investment in time as a force that both gives meaning and structure to identity and, at the
same time, denies it, as anything is possible. For example, consider “the evening is spread out against the
sky,” could just be a darkness that Prufrock exudes or sees that covers up the actual daylight (2).
So, we see that Prufrock takes controls o f time and self through articulation and representation.
Through his imagination he uses fast-forwards and pauses to answer his questions and satisfy his identity
quest as a melancholic self-fulfilling prophecy. Essentially Prufrock is held captive to the creeping and
inhibiting sensation that everything that might happen is foreknown, making any sense of free will or need
to have an identity a delusion. Consequently, time cannot go fast or slow enough for the restless Prufrock,
so he manipulates temporality through extremes of self-representation, either fast-forwarding him self to old
age or wallowing in the bottom o f the sea, losing him self in nothingness to escape the demands o f the
social world. In this way, Prufrock suggests that the same anxieties o f appearance, apprehensions toward
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intimacy, and routines o f bachelorhood will haunt him in old age, thus finding excuses to not act through
projecting common denominators o f identity across age and time. "Prufrock" interrogates how our
relationship to time shapes our identity and how identity is a product o f our self-representation through
time. Prufrock’s obsession with wasting time implies that he has plenty o f time and feels crushed by the
weight o f what to do with it, yet his fixation on lost opportunities for intimacy indicates the present is
already dictating the future so it is already too late.
Through producing a self-fulfilling pattern to anesthetize him self against the sting o f rejection and
the discomfort o f failing to meet expectations, Prufrock expresses exhaustion at the thought of “restless
nights in one-night cheap hotels,” thereby assuaging his anxieties around intimacy and fear o f rejection by
saying sex is so boring (6). Moments suggestive of intimacy or sexual tension frequently present
themselves through references to women, who emerge as a catechism for all time and desire that Prufrock
cannot control. He interprets the very presence o f women as an aggressive act on their part to interrupt his
narrative impetus and characterizes all their behavior and representation as dictated by their desire, not his.
Like the women who presumably flock to see the statue o f presumably a naked man in "Prufrock" or get off
on Chopin in "Portrait o f a Lady," the woman walking down the street in "Prufrock" becomes "perfume
from a dress," so that the smell o f her desire to consume on a sexual and commercial level becomes writ
large: a emergency broadcast interruption o f Prufrock’s cerebral musings (65).
The lone woman out wandering in his urban space is all the more threatening, as he cannot
quarantine her to a room, so Prufrock lashes out at the sight o f arms in the lamplight. The horror of seeing
creepy animal-like hair on delicate female arms repulses Prufrock before his initial arousal even finds an
outlet; by fetishizing his own disgust, he deflects an inability to overcome his fear o f losing control. Such
images validate Prufrock’s sense of being ensnared in some horrible nightmare, constantly avoiding the
trappings o f intimacy and the sticky web o f a feminized bourgeoisie society. As we briefly touched upon
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earlier, through these images o f extended arms or whiffs of fragrances, women appear in bits and pieces in
’’Prufrock." Many critics, such as Carol Christ, read this as symptomatic o f Eliot’s misogynistic perspective
attempting to enact violence towards women through objectification and marginalization. Elaborating this
point, critic Melita Schaum interprets this misogyny as systemic to Eliot’s sense of cultural crisis, witnessed
in the assertion of the female as sexualized, commercial consumer and the subsequent fear of the female as
sexual aggressor, mate selector and purveyor of culture and taste. Just like the narrator o f "Conversation
Galante" and "Prufrock," the narrator o f "Portrait of a Lady," registers such concerns of feminine
aggression and sexually tainted musical taste with the “bloom,” being “rubbed,” in the concert room, which
the narrator tries to cordon off in an attempt to forestall the encroaching sphere o f female influence (12-13).
Furthermore, Eliot’s uses these female acts of sexually driven art consumption as an objective
correlative for his aversion to bourgeois cultural taste. The female gaze thus stands for this type o f cultural
decline and suggests discomfort under the social pressure o f gender and identity demands. For instance, the
narrator o f "Portrait o f a Lady" seeks to avoid this female gaze for it might entrap and debase him to
perform to the lady’s taste: “like a dancing bear” (111). In Eliot’s early poetry the female gaze sexually
stigmatizes and thereby defiles and debases through depraved desire anything it might gravitate to. Just as
in "Prufrock," under the pressure o f a female gaze, the narrator o f "Portrait o f a Lady," projects an image of
his animal state as his response. As “a dancing bear,” caught up in a swirl o f “bocks,” in a state of “tobacco
trance,” the narrator implies that his female companion is pushing him to join her in consuming and
escaping in order to satisfy her sense of what a young, artistic experience should be: his identity becomes
momentarily subsumed in her pathetic attempt to reclaim her long-lost “buried life” (111, 112-113 and 53).
The way Eliot collapses this lady’s sexual and artistic demands speaks to his concern o f female gaze as a
debasing presence, stuck looking to arouse some romantic conceit o f the past to rekindle a sullied version
o f aesthetic pleasure. The way Prufrock sees women reflects his experience o f their presence as a violation
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more than it does an intentional or desired violence against their physical bodies. Christ concludes that
“these scattered body parts at once imply and evade a central encounter the speaker cannot bring him self to
confront,” and we are left wondering what this encounter might be.
According to critic Michael North, this encounter is sex. North argues, "the horror o f sex seems to
come in part from its power to metonymize. Like Augustine, Eliot sees sex as the tyranny of one part of the
body over the whole,” so that "sexual desire pulls the body apart, so that to give in to it is to suffer
permanent dismemberment” (North). Prufrock’s senses threaten to pull his narrative apart when confronted
with the sights and smells o f the female other and then he becomes immediately repulsed by his desire and
we are unsure precisely what these back and forth impulses mean. We cannot be sure if this performed
repulsion references his sense o f failure for being unable to eschew biological instinct, his experience of
discomfort in the face o f awakening sexual attractions or a grotesque curiosity regarding sexual desire.
Along these lines, Schaum draws our attention to the objectification of both female and male genders in the
poem (343). This fragmentation o f viewership and the dread of dispossession also therefore manifests the
fragmentation of Prufrock's own identity, as he wishes to be a pair of scuttling claws.
In the movement o f the poem, his interactions with others inform his self-perception, as he comes
to perform identities that reflect how he experiences other people: as disembodied and synecdochic
activities o f self. Prufrock feels him self “formulated, sprawling on a pin,” suggesting that he has been
reduced to a formula that can be examined and scrutinized (56). By definition, a formula is reducible to
parts and predictable, like a set o f numbers that puts in motion a certain end (“Formula,” OED). So to say
he feels formulated means Prufrock can see his conclusion written in the very fibers of his being, such as
the narrative o f self-fulfilling prophecy we have discussed, and he thus suffers from a paranoia that he is
transparent to someone else, himself, or to both. Ironically, Prufrock is transparent to the reader, as Eliot
cannot resist adding every layer o f irony possible to the poem. While Prufrock squirms uncomfortably, the
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object o f examination, we can imagine him blushing like a teenager under the “eyes that fix him,” possibly
the eyes o f a woman (56). The reason we could read this gaze as feminine stems from the section that
immediately follows wherein Prufrock undergoes a psychological examination, spewing out the “butt-ends
o f his days and w ays” in the form of expressing disgust at hair on women’s arms (60).
Caught in the web o f presuming to know, Prufrock tries to flip the magnifying lens onto another,
but this ultimately functions as a projection of his own consciousness. Notice that the “butt-ends of his days
and w ays,” are sensual memories of women, of their arms, hair, and smells metaphorically present as a
wasteful and disgusting reminders of his uncontrolled desire (60). Butt-ends of cigarettes refer to a life
wasted chasing an addiction, which connects to women as an intoxicating, yet toxic influence that distracts
in the next stanza. These lower impulses incite dread at the thought of exposure. Prufrock’s melancholic
imagination and self-portrayal as a passive victim expresses his impatience for resignation. Prufrock cannot
“force the moment to a crisis” fast enough (80). Prufrock’s unique relationship to time arises not from a
supernatural talent, but from sheer apathy and the cynicism o f his teenage ego that seeks nocturnal
wanderings and philosophical musings to escape the demands and expectations of growing up or satisfying
the previous generation. Prufrock’s vision o f his future self as a decrepit old man satisfies and justifies his
morbid fascination with wasted time.
VI.
Publication and Reception: Contextual Atmosphere
“Twenty twenty twenty four hours to go
I wanna be sedated
Nothing to do, no where to go” (The Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated”).
As part o f identifying how Eliot develops his own voice and poetics through the mechanism
teenaged urban persona o f Prufrock, let us look to the poem’s publication process and reception. “Prufrock”
was completed in 1911, yet remained in a personal journal and only shared with close literary peers, such
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as Conrad Aiken, until Aiken introduced the poems to influential critic Ezra Pound (Bush). Through Aiken,
Eliot met Pound in September 1914 and Pound began to champion his works (Moody, 52). At this point, as
Sultan clarifies, “Eliot and the few fellow-poets who knew and liked ‘Prufrock’ had failed to place it. Harold
Monro not only rejected it for Poetry and Drama, but according to Conrad Aiken, thought it ‘bordered on
insanity’” (79). Pound anticipated that the “poem would ‘at once differentiate'" Eliot from other poets; for,
as he wrote to editor Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine, Eliot had "actually trained him self and
modernized him self on his own” (Pound qtd. in Sultan, 79 and Pound qtd. in Bush). As we have explored,
Eliot modernized him self through critical engagement with the recent poetics of the Victorians, French
Symbolists and the past precedent of the Metaphysical poets, as well as, the philosophy o f consciousness
and the aesthetics o f the very Modern medium o f cinema.
Poetry, a Magazine o f Verse founded in 1912, pioneered the publication o f newly emerging Modern
verse and was considered to be the leading Modern literary journal and thus securing a place for Prufrock
became a crucial project to Pound (Blair, 885-886). Though Poetry magazine prided itself on publishing
modern works, Pound had to write an exhaustive series o f letters “prodding the reluctant” Monroe, to print
this poem that was “apparently too modern even for her” (Sultan, 78-79). According to Bush, Monroe
disliked it [“Prufrock”] for its “overbearing sense o f futility.” However, the perceived futility o f the poem
forms one of the qualities that Eliot develops as part o f the overwhelming overabundance of time
experienced by adolescent Prufrock. Pound finally persuaded Monroe to print the poem in June 1915,
praising “Prufrock” to Monroe as “‘the best poem I have yet seen or had from an American’” (Whalan, 110).
Larger circulation o f the poem came in 1917, when the Pound's own journal Egoist printed Prufrock and
Other Observations w ith the silent financial support of Ezra and Dorothy Pound (Bush).
At the time it first appears, Eliot’s poetry garners mixed responses from literary pundits; so as
Altieri suggests, “for Eliot’s initial impact we must place ourselves within the world o f V ictorian... poetry,
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as if for the first time confronting the opening o f ‘Prufrock’” (196). Most critical response to Eliot's
collection o f verse focuses on the titular poem “Prufrock” for, as Moody describes, “it gathers up the others
written about the same time into a more developed and more fully resolved vision” (30). So let us turn to
the immediate reception o f the poem within the literary world by looking to a spectrum of critical responses
from 1917 and 1918. From an anonymous review released just after publication in June of 1917, a critic
writes, “Mr. Eliot's notion o f poetry - he calls the 'observations' poems - seems to be a purely analytical
treatment, verging sometimes on the catalogue, of personal relations and environments, uninspired by any
glimpse beyond them ” (Unsigned Review, Times Literary Supplement). This review draws our attention to
the fact that Eliot absolutely frames his work as a different approach to writing and a different orientation
to the function o f poetry by entitling these poems “Observations,” which would immediately alert the reader
to look at the poems differently and to focus on the imperative of the poems' visual imagery.
However, this above reviewer does not care to explore an alternative approach suggested by Eliot's
title, primarily because he does not care for Eliot’s use of the poets' own urban environment as the site for
the poetic. The review concludes with these biting remarks: “The fact that these things occurred to the mind
o f Mr. Eliot is surely o f the very smallest importance to any one - even to himself. They certainly have no
relation to 'poetry,' and we only give an example because some o f the pieces, he states, have appeared in a
periodical which claims that word as its title” (Unsigned Review, Times Literary Supplement). Delightfully
snarky, this reviewer actually taps into key components of Eliot’s modern departure from past poetry by
mentioning Eliot’s use o f his own urban environment and the absence o f expected escape into a Romantic
apprehension o f nature or a resolution in Absolute truth. The review find no poetry in Eliot's study of
consciousness or analytical and nuanced separation between speaker and poet. Thus, this reviewer
considers Eliot’s work to transgress boundaries o f what poetry should be.
Another anonymous negative response from July 15, 1917 sounds personally offended by Eliot’s
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insubordination: “Mr. Eliot is one o f those clever young men who find it amusing to pull the leg of a sober
reviewer. We can imagine his saying to his friends: 'See me have a lark out o f the old fogies who don't
know a poem from a pea-shooter. I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it The
Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock”’ (Unsigned Review, Literary World). Significantly, this reviewer
emphasizes Eliot’s youth in contrast to the critics' own old age and the presumed old age of his literary
colleagues. The above review concludes by stating, “all beauty has in it an element o f strangeness, but here
the strangeness overbalances the beauty” (Unsigned Review, Literary World). According to the OED,
“strangeness” is “the quality o f being strange, foreign, unfamiliar, uncommon, unusual.” Thus, “Prufrock”
sounded so absurd to the critic that this precludes pleasure in the verse. In fact, the poem brought out the
critics' own insecurities about being made into a mockery as the subject o f a joke.
Just like our last sober reviewer, the zenith o f negative reviewers comes in the form o f one Mr.
Arthur Waugh, in a publication entitled Quarterly, wherein he scolds Eliot by admonishing the young poet
for being a “drunken slave.” Perhaps Waugh is responding to the presence of anesthesia and alcohol in the
works when he describes Eliot as drunk. Ezra Pound of course responds to this review, exclaiming “I shall
call my next anthology 'Drunken Helots' if I can find a dozen poems written half so well as [‘Prufrock’]”
(Pound, “Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot”). Referencing this repartee, critic May Sinclair provides extremely
helpful insight in her December o f 1917 commentary, responding that she knows “that Mr. Waugh is
simply keeping up the good old manly traditions o f the Quarterly ’ (May, 10). Again, the old age of the
literary world, in opposition to the youthful voice o f the poet becomes the subtext o f the reception and
contributes to my reading o f Prufrock as a teenager. While I do not follow these early responses which
collapse the narrator and poet, the fact that these readings stress the youthful rebellion o f Eliot the poet as
representative o f the poem, indicates that Prufrock’s voice was largely perceived as teenaged or young adult
and not middle aged at the time o f publication. In addition, Sinclair’s use of the word “manly” echoes my
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discussion o f the powerlessness o f Prufrock’s masculine gender identity (10).
Thus, Sinclair suggests that both the youth of the writer or the youth embodied in the poem and the
type o f masculine identity presented in the poem would be in opposition to the “old manly traditions” of
Quarterly (10). While Sinclair attests that some o f this back and forth feels like a “journalistic
misadventure,” she asserts that “Mr. Eliot is dangerous,” as his “genius is in itself disturbing” (10-11). She
writes, “he does not see anything between him and reality, he makes straight for the reality he sees; he cuts
all corners and curves; and this type of directness o f method is startling and upsetting to comfortable and
respected people accustomed to going superfluously in and out o f corners and carefully around curves”
(11). Sinclair thus senses that somehow Eliot accelerated the progression o f poetics to more directly attack
reality. Therefore, Sinclair explicates, critics who call him drunk or prefer the simplest poem in the
collection, “Boston Evening Transcript,” do so because they do not understand what Eliot tries to develop
and it is easier to reject it than to wrestle with the connotations of his verse.
She then goes on to assert that Eliot’s insistence upon reality and his use of “ugly” imagery “identify
Mr. Eliot with a modernist tendency” (11). Specifically in relation to Prufrock, Sinclair adds, that Eliot “is
careful to present his street and his drawing room as they are, and Prufrock’s thoughts as they are: live
thoughts, kicking, running about and jumping, nervily, in a live brain” (12). If Eliot read this review, he
would most likely be pleased that, Sinclair incisively picks up on his effort to realistically portray
consciousness. “Observe the method,” Sinclair instructs, “instead o f writing round and round about
Prufrock, explaining that his tragedy is the tragedy o f some submerged passion, Mr. Eliot simply removes
the covering from Prufrock’s m ind” and we see him “like an animal, hunted, tormented, terribly and
poignantly alive” (13). She concludes her perceptive critique by eloquently reminding the reader: “it is
nothing to the Q uarterly... that Mr. Eliot should have done this thing. But it is a great deal to the few
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people who care for poetry and insist that it should concern itself with reality” (13). Eliot thus immediately
spoke to others, like Sinclair, equally invested in the pursuit of a new way to access reality and the
phenomenology o f consciousness.
In addition to the contested crossroads of Modernism and art and literature inhabited by “Prufrock”
at the time, the poem also connects with a larger cultural discourse about masculinity and modernity by
virtue o f being published during World War I. As we have discussed, Eliot dedicates the 1917 publication
o f dedication to Verdenal, who died in War. While critic John T. Mayer is quick to point out that Eliot did
this due to the quality o f their friendship and did not include “the clarifier "mort aux Dardanelles" that
would identify him as a victim o f war,” until 1925, it is hard to imagine seeing a young man’s lifespan as
1889-1915 would not be evocative o f the young male sacrifice o f War (201-202). Whether this dedication
is an intentional war time reference or not does not matter as much aw how it would have been perceived;
so either inferred in 1917 or directly shown by 1925, in framing his poems with a dedication to fallen
solider, Eliot’s connects his verse to a broader discourse o f masculine suffering and Modern cultural
disillusionment.
As his later poetry would demonstrate, Eliot feels compelled to write poetry that took into account
the effects o f World War II on Western civilization and the individual’s psyche, famously “The Wasteland”
and “The Hollowmen.” “Prufrock” is o f course not a war poem like these, for it was not written during or
after War or about War directly, but it is hard not to image that with the War as a cultural backdrop, the
poem made more sense to speak in such dark, morbid terms about Modern life. The 1917 publication, and
the subsequent wider 1919 release, organically position the poem to speak to War related experience. In
Anthony Fletcher’s article, “Patriotism, the Great War and the Decline o f Victorian M anliness,” he
discusses the emergent idea o f young male sacrifice and male as patient in the post-war world and both
these cultural trends grant “Prufrock” yet another foothold into cultural consciousness. Fletcher explores the
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way “Victorian manliness built upon Christian gentility and Social Darwinism” was put to the test and
complicated by World War I (42). The Prufrock body likewise became a vessel for cultural investments in
issues o f masculinity, sexuality, youth and identity with the modern experience of the War and changing
gender roles. The War thus became a catalyst for examining cultural shifts impacting gender identity; thus,
published in a post-war context, Prufrock provided a potential means for readers to experience these
concerns.
As Fletcher outlines, cultural concepts o f manliness became contested during World War I with
women taking over in the workplace and earning the right to vote, in other words the invasion of the female
into male spaces, which finds consonance with spatially manifested gender concerns and the fear of female
encroachment into male territories in “Prufrock.” With the actuality o f war exposing male weakness and
vulnerability and putting assumptions o f male gender roles into question, Prufrock’s concerns seem less
subjectively specific and neurotic and more of a broader cultural scope and mainstream concern. As
Fletcher writes, “Day by day, week by week, the manliness men had learnt in youth...w as dented, chipped
away, managed and jeopardized” (47). The image of etherized male patient would have had wider
resonance and the awareness o f mortality and fear o f wasted youth would have been more prescient
concerns during and after the war. With the war, as Fletcher summarizes, “a sea change of medical attitudes
to the male psyche had begun;” in particular, the term “shell-shock” gave words to a war specific experience
o f male mental and physical weakness, which in turn, opened the door to a much larger cultural discussion
o f male anxiety and insecurity as endemic to Modern experience (Fletcher, 51).
The British “Royal Society o f Medicine accepted in January o f 1916, that it [shell shock] covered a
series o f nervous disorders, not all caused by proximity to shells, but with a solders loss o f control of his
nerves as the feature in common” (51). As a ripple effect, Fletcher summarizes, “the ideals of Victorian
manhood [were] being successively clouded, undermined, overwhelmed and devastated, as solders
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reinterpreted their youthful trench warfare” (60). Through letters, journals, memories and autobiographies
o f WWI soldiers, Fletcher demonstrates this process by which these servicemen “sought to reconstruct their
identity by redefining their ideals o f manliness with which they had grown up” in order to chart the shift
cultural perception and experience o f masculinity post-W ar (62). Along these lines, Mitchell discusses
advances in nineteenth-century ushered in an unprecedented age of self-monitoring, self-diagnosis and self
analysis both on a medical and psychological level that deeply impacted notions o f modern masculine
identity (17).
Thus, through the specific wartime context and the subsequent concentrated medical effort on the
male patient, the male patient image alludes to an experience that would be specifically modern and
viscerally evocative to Eliot’s contemporaries. Ether, for example, was a commonly used drug in surgeries
at the time and the experience o f the self as a monitored, helpless patient in the grip o f a fever or anesthesia
would likely strike a chord with readers. Another point to note is that trench warfare was described by
solders through similar terms to those Prufrock uses, for example as Fletcher observes, “it was their
enforced passivity under shellfire that men remembered most vividly, ‘You can do nothing but sit or stand
or crouch... time seems to stand still,’ wrote Thomas M arks” (62). “Prufrock” thus becomes prophetically
evocative o f these war-related sensations o f watching oneself and feeling out o f control subjection and
emasculation, as well as, the fugitive self and fantasy o f escape, possibly through death.
M onroe’s criticism o f the poem’s futility again emerges as perhaps part o f the quality that seals the
appeal o f “Prufrock,” in prophetically mirroring the cultural atmosphere in 1917, where the futility of war,
male as patient and the loss o f young life would have spoken to war-time cultural Zeitgeists. Meaning is
ultimately the combination o f context and creation, so I think we cannot overlook the connections between
the issues o f the poem and the issues brought to the forefront o f cultural consciousness during Word War I.
Seeing how the poem connects to larger narratives o f masculinity and modern experience is crucial to
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understanding the Modern nature of the poem, The narrator as a teenaged male growing up during a rapidly
modernizing and urbanizing time and contributing to the afterlife o f the poem.
VII.
Prufrock’s Afterlife as Blueprint for Teenage Failure
“You should see how the women treat me
Perhaps I should have the guts to see I’m a failure
A teenage failu re...” (Chad and Jeremy).
As we can thus see from the cultural context and immediate literary response to “Prufrock,” the
poem provides a blueprint for youthful expression and engages a decisively Modern discourse regarding
masculinity, identity and culture and how these forces rewrite the past, shape the present, and inform the
future o f young men in the rapidly changing world. The “Prufrock” prototype of masculine teenaged
exposition forms a crucial cultural narrative and looking to the continued presence o f this pattern helps us
to explicate the poem ’s continued appeal and inclusion in the classroom. As Soles, the educator I refer to at
the opening o f this paper, assumed no alternative to Prufrock as a middle-aged character, he did not
encourage his students to explore potential connection between “Prufrock” and other modern narratives.
Soles instead asked his students give advice to this sad forty-year old Prufrock, which in effect pushes the
persona to caricature; such an approach emerges as absolutely antithetical to my reading o f Eliot presenting
a study o f young adult male consciousness in the Modern world.
In all my research on teaching “Prufrock,” I found only one study directly discussing teaching
“Prufrock” in terms o f rebellious expressivity connected to teenaged culture; for in the apropos year of
1969, high school teacher David Morse publishes an article entitled “Avant-Rock in the Classroom,” where
he realizes that rock and roll is here to stay by this point and that rock music in a way is a new form of
poetry. Morse perceives that “the whole avant-rock movement clearly challenges the traditional notion of
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what is literature, in much the same way that Elizabethan drama challenged earlier definitions of theater,”
so he sets out to engage students who might otherwise fall asleep in class to explore the question o f if
“traditional poetry [can] coexist with the new form” o f rock in the English classroom (196-197). As Morse
suggests, through its rebellious front, rock music embodies the tension between changing forms of verbal
and written artistic expression and the desire to be relatable to the past, present and future. Ironically the
friction between the modes o f more visceral performed subversion and sometimes subtle subtextual longing
for connection, energetically connect this new form to an existent larger cultural narrative evolving forms
to speak to expanding and shifting consciousness of existence while still being relatable.
Not only did Morse realize that rock music “commands high interest” to his students by virtue of
being framed in an aura o f rebellion, newness and coolness, then by “listening to records at home, I
discovered — as you will — parallels from my own store of poems,” and therefore perceived that part of
the appeal o f this new form o f expression actually lay in its’ connection to the past (199). Morse's savvy
approach sees rock music as an artistic recalibration o f past patterns to fit the needs o f a changing world.
He outlines his curriculum, writing “we began with human relations as a sort of touchstone, depicting love
and the breakdown o f love. Since this is almost the sole matter of the most popular Rock and Roll, it was
easy to began appealing [to high school students];” Morse then specifies that he began with use of The
Doors song “Baby Light My Fire,” “interspaced with these were ‘To His Coy M istress,’ ‘Lord Randall’ and
‘The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock’ (199-200). The Doors chart-topping 1967 song which Morse selects,
features a male speaker appealing to an anonymous “girl” to “light the night on fire,” as “the time to hesitate
is through / no time to wallow in the mire / try now we can only lose / and our love become a funeral pyre”
(The Doors). Morse's song selection tells a certain story of presumably young adult masculine expression,
pleading with a young lady to accept his invitation to love and “Prufrock” expresses similar themes, and
thus makes for a fruitful exercise in compare and contrast for Morse's pedagogical purposes.
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The simple connections drawn through M orse’s high school level approach can be expanded into
deeper parallels between the two works. While the tone o f “Baby Light My Fire,” appears more confident
and urgent, systematically avoiding “wallow[ing] in the mire,” with repeatedly insisting some nonsense
about “lighting] the night on fire,” but importantly there is a mire one can wallow in and the image of love
as a “funeral pyre” speaks to the death of something through its absence or failure (The Doors).
Significantly, there is a darkness lurking that the speaker o f this song acknowledges, as he is currently in a
state o f not having love, hoping for an escape through this love he does not have and ultimately this love
might just go up in flames like a horrible disaster. Ultimately, regardless o f if the love is a success or a
failure it will go up in flames, so that destruction and passion become intertwined in some twisted scene o f
sex-death wish fulfillment. The absence of realized desire and imagined destruction through consummation
or extinction, evokes a sense o f pointlessness that the speaker tries to deflect through repeatedly asserting
the rapid passing o f time to his presumed companion. Similarly, in “Prufrock,” time is an epicenter of
narrative impetuous and interpretation, and thus, in both “Prufrock” and “Baby Light My Fire,” the
narrator’s representation o f time provides him a means of asserting control and generating meaning in a
world o f seemingly constant deferment.
Thus, just like Prufrock’s supposed love song, “Baby Light my Fire,” does not express being in
love, but rather “depict[s] the breakdown of love,” drawing our attention to the vulnerability of the young
male narrators in the face o f desire and the subsequent images o f wasted time, death and destruction he
obsesses over to ease his sense o f rejection (199). M orse’s pedagogical insights mirror my desire to push
“Prufrock,” into meaning through demonstrating how the poem develops a prototype of Modern masculine
teenaged expression, which I think helps explicate the poem’s continued afterlife and provides a revitalized
reading. Utilizing “Baby Light My Fire, "to effectively lower a rope into the past to guide his students to
approach “Prufrock,” Morse touches upon issues o f frustrated sexual impulses, apprehension of the
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pressures o f time and proclivity for images o f aging, death and destruction to embody these feelings of
rebellion and teenaged feelings. By breaking down boundaries o f expected behavior and expression, the
teenager is the embodiment o f Modern expression. To call on one last contemporaneous review of
“Prufrock,” in 1918 critic Edgar Jepson writes of the poem: “It is new in form, as all genuine poetry is new
in form; it is musical with a new music, and that without any straining after newness. The form and music
are a natural, integral part o f the poet's amazingly fine presentation of his vision of the world. Could
anything be more United States, more of the soul o f that modern land, than ‘Prufrock’” (428)? Thus, at the
time o f publication, “Prufrock” provided a new love song, a new music for new frontiers o f experience by
setting into motion a means o f direct, authentic expression and use of adolescent experiences in the urban
world.
Jepson’s review also draws our attention to the lyricism o f the poem itself; it does titularly claim to
be a love song after all and this point should not be overlooked. As Moody points out, Prufrock’s “attempt
to fit the elements o f his world to his music creates a larger interest” (31-32). Not only does Eliot's narrator
attempt to transpose his world through positioning him self among the sounds o f the city and away from the
Chopin in the concert room, Eliot him self asserts poetry as a mode of lyrical cultural expression. As I
quoted Eliot in my Introduction, the poet considers “the music o f poetry, then, must be a music latent in the
common speech o f the tim e” (“Music o f Poetry,” 24). Emulating Baudelaire's mode o f “release and
expression for men,” Eliot seeks to further develop a blueprint for modern masculine expression in poetry
and song (377). Drawing together the critical insights of Jepson, Moody and Morse with Eliot’s own
aesthetic assertions, I want conclude this paper by more fully exploring the poem ’s afterlife in American
and British rock. We can find so many examples o f songs speaking in shades o f the Prufrockian precedent
for expression o f teenaged consciousness, but I will isolate just a few to illustrate the afterlife.
To start expanding M orse’s curriculum, I want to first focus the way "Prufrock" stands for a
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pattern o f modern male experience of powerlessness in the face of unrealized or failed love. Turning to
modern iterations o f this prototype, consider Grinderman’s 2007 "No Pussy Blues." In this song, the
speaker introduces his experience o f self through a similar trope o f exhaustion and disembodiment: “My
face is finished, my body's gone” (Grinderman). Then the narrator describes facing “questioning eyes,”
which push him collapse into him self and force him into a frantic, self-affirming mantra to try and survive
the onslaught o f these eyes: “I must above all things love m y se lf (Grinderman). Yet then this narrator, just
like Prufrock becomes distracted from this personal path o f overcoming his fears by the possibility o f easily
escaping his crushing self-awareness and prison o f subjectivity through intimacy with another. The narrator
o f Grinderman's song finds a pair of the eyes upon him and rushes to ask this girl out, but “she just didn't
want to;” thus the female gaze makes him feel insecure and just reminds him o f judgm ent and eventual
rejection.
The narrator, like Prufrock tries on different modes o f courtship and masculinity, stating “I
combed the hairs across my head, I sucked in my gut and still she said, that she just didn't want to;” in other
words, no matter how much he performs the masculinity he thinks she desires, she will not accept him
(Grinderman). The reason I initially thought o f this song, is that the narrator mentions he even “read her
Eliot,” and she still has not wavered; so we leave the narrator suffering in a never-ending state of protracted
desire, unrealized self and failed intimacy, drowning in a refrain of “no pussy blues” (Grinderman). The
direct reference to Eliot speaks to the narrator trying to make sense o f his experience by connecting to a
larger narrative o f troubled masculinity distracted from identity by the female gaze and the presence of a
woman. In "No Pussy Blues," the narrator’s identity is destabilized by his unrealized desire in the most
direct terms and while the persona is not necessarily teenaged, his identity crisis and the desire for escape
from subjectivity through instinctual impulse in a sexually fraught atmosphere express certain subtextual
tropes o f Prufrock's identity formation journey.
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Next, I want to focus on the connections o f Prufrock's narrative to those of specifically teenaged
persona in a striking iteration: Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.” This 1971 song speaks to the teenage years
as a volatile temporal space and horrifying visions of old age; watching “lines form on my face and my
hands,” exacerbates the narrator’s sensation o f being beholden to the nightmare of temporal instability, as
he cries out, “I'm in the middle the middle of life / I’m a boy and I'm a man" ("I'm Eighteen"). The line,
“I’ve got a baby's brain and an old man's heart,” paraphrases Prufrock’s conflicted identity as a teenager
already disillusioned and unable to focus long enough on larger intellectual pursuits to arrive at a
conclusion before being distracted by the world around him ("I'm Eighteen"). Alice Cooper's song
replicates this Prufrockian consciousness o f youth overwrought with the weight of an exhausting existence,
wherein the only escape from this horrid future seems to be a protracted state o f self-fulfilling doubt and
hesitation interspersed with the distraction o f potential immediate gratification. For both works, being a
teenager appears characterized by uncertainty and entrapment, producing an overriding desire to escape.
Like Prufrock, Alice Cooper’s narrator “feels like I'm livin' in the middle o f doubt," squirming
uncomfortably in this temporally ambiguous space, which he physicalizes as a place: "Eighteen, I gotta get
away / 1 gotta get outta this place." At this point o f imagined departure, Alice Cooper's narrator, like
Prufrock, also fantasizes an inverted word, wherein “I'll go runnin' in outer space” serves as an updated sea
floor upon which to scuttle away from the juggernaut of normative time. In both "Prufrock" and “I’m
Eighteen,” this fantastic escape becomes manifest as an evasion o f normative human relationships with
time. Either in space or as an animal, both narrators seek to redefine their identity through trying to change
or control their relationship with time. The redefinition o f self is an expression of teenaged identity crisis of
not fitting into a category and rebelling against the inevitable categorization o f being in terms o f gender and
age. Eliot's subversive engagement with reader at the beginning o f his poem forms a hook replicated in
another Alice Cooper song, "Welcome to My Nightmare," where the song is predicated upon drawing the
listener into the speaker's consciousness.
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While Prufrock’s invitation turns into an insidious inclusion in his nightmare, the narrative voice
o f "Welcome to My Nightmare," directly capitalizes upon the appeal o f danger and subversion through
expressing darker tones o f authentic experience: “Welcome to my nightmare, I think you're gonna like it, I
think you're gonna feel you belong. A nocturnal vacation, unnecessary sedation, you want to feel at home
'cause you belong." Thus, the narrators of both these Alice Cooper song push the Prufrock pattern to speak
to teenaged experience as a shared experience, for as we saw from the few reviews which did see the value
in "Prufrock," Eliot gives youthful Modernism a place, in the form of the space generated by artistic
expression, to belong. As Haba o b serves," By looking again, and as far as possible, with fresh eyes, we
may see that this poem ['Prufrock'], traditionally regarded as a portrait of alienation, in fact offers us a way
out o f alienation and into community" (54). Just as Eliot connected with the French Symbolists, his
narrative relieves the burden o f subjectivity, isolation and alienation through engendering a community of
expressing authentic experience.
Consider lines from a more recent song, Public Image Ltd.’s 2012 “One Drop,” wherein the
narrator engenders a rallying cry, embracing the disorder of teenaged experience:
We come from chaos, you cannot change us
Cannot explain us and that's what makes us
We are the ageless, we are teenagers
We are the focused out o f the hopeless (Public Image Ltd).
These lines focus on the expressive quality o f the teenager, as the pulse of Modernism and an exciting point
o f identity, and seek to build a community out o f a shared experience o f disorder, ineffability and desire to
escape from the hopeless world o f adults. Eliot's "Portrait o f a Lady," sets up a similar contrast between the
world o f the Lady living a buried life and the young narrator, wherein teenaged experience stands for
disruption and change for artistic vitalism and belonging to a new way o f being in the Modern world. Thus,
93
by transforming alienation into community, Eliot provides a template for modern teenaged experience that
is still very much alive today, particularly in rock music. By delving into the “unexplored resources o f the
unpoetical,” Eliot transformed modern urban experience into the site of the poetic through an allencompassing teenaged sensibility of Prufrock, coming of age and speaking in modern, current language.
Eliot invites the reader into the poem showing that there is a value to the present shared experience
o f everyday life through the poetic technique of objective correlative and the assertion o f metonymic builds
toward meaning. Eliot writes a poem as a prototype for Modern masculine teenaged experience and reading
Prufrock as a middle aged man overlooks the significance o f the cultural narrative o f teenagehood that
needed a face and form at the time the experience of coming of age in urban environs become more the
norm than the exception. Eliot's teenaged persona of Prufrock demonstrates that through artistic
engagement with the complications of Modern experience and temporal instability, you can give shape to
identity and a form to all that you are feeling:
The time is too short but never too long
To reach ahead, to project the image
Which will in time become a concrete dream (Wire).
In conclusion, reading Prufrock as a teenager, rather than a middle-aged man, demonstrates how the
poem crystallizes Eliot's early poetic and critical experience as a reader and a writer, responding to the past
and looking to resonate with the future. In addition, this reading unlocks the afterlife of Prufrock as a rich
site for critical and pedagogical engagement with the poem as a prototype for expressing adolescence and
putting into motion a pattern that would captures a twentieth-century Zeitgeist: the teenager. For if we read
"Prufrock" as a concrete dream o f a teenage wasteland, we can escape from the limitations of an
interpretation that separates art and form; Eliot utilizes modern language, tone and imagery to speak to
Modern tropes o f coming o f age and investments in identity and age as contested spaces in a rapidly
changing world. Prufrock ultimately forms the objective correlative to Eliot's poetic quest to energize
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material and methods in order to express an authentic, vital narrative for Modern identity through the
mechanism o f the adolescent ability to consume all experience into a cohesive sensibility.
95
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