This document discusses T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". It analyzes Eliot's style, which involves juxtaposing images without explanation to build meaning. It summarizes the plot of the poem, in which Prufrock hesitates to ask a question at a social gathering. The document discusses how the poem subverts expectations of heroism in poetry by portraying modern anxieties and the failure of both action and self-expression through language.

1. ELIT 46C
Day 15
ELIOT AND JOYCE
AND ALTERNATIVE LOVE SONGS

2. Business / Participation
Office hours canceled all this week.
Midterm, Part 2:
◦ Add parts 1 and 2 together and divide by 100. That’s
your percentage.
◦ Mean is 87% which is a low B+. I am perfectly
content with that. No curve.
Paper 2 assignment is posted on Canvas. Check it
out!
Student evals today toward end of class.
Participation today:
◦ 2 points: both for individual contributions.
(Don’t worry—we’ll have time for group work again
next week.)

3. Thursday
Dr. Kim Palmore will be here.
This is a TREAT (if you don’t already know this).
Be on time, bring your books, and have read T.
S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and the Norton
intro to it (2529-43).
This poem is HARD. But read it and be
prepared to work through it with Kim.

4. Chronology / Terminology
So our chronology in this course is about to get
a bit messed up.
◦ We’re essentially going to skip WWI this week
and return to it next week.
◦ Will also return to Joyce next week.
◦ So be careful—and keep this in mind.
Want to introduce you to a word: modernism
◦ complicated word that means many things—
some of them disputed.
◦ associated strongly with the two authors we
read for today, Eliot and Joyce, but not
necessarily the works we read for today (which
are earlier).
◦ Dr. Palmore will say a lot more about modernism
on Thursday and then we’ll pick it up again later
next week.

5. Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot 1888-1965
Born in St Louis, Missouri—though to a Boston family
with deep New England roots.
Undergrad and graduate school at Harvard—studied
philosophy
Spent a year in Paris, then back to Harvard.
Fellowship at Oxford as WWI broke out. Never really
lived in America again.
1915: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” published
at Ezra Pound’s recommendation.
Married a woman he didn’t like, worked as a school
teacher.
1922: The Waste Land.
1927: converted to Anglicanism and became British
citizen.
Commits wife to mental hospital (she dies in 1947).
1948: Nobel Prize in Literature.
1957: marries his secretary. They are happy.
Buried in English countryside, monument in Poet’s
Corner.

6. Eliot’s Style
1. He owed a huge debt to the so-called “Metaphysical Poets” of the 17C: John Donne, Andrew Marvell, etc.
◦ He wrote a very famous essay on them. Until that point, they were somewhat out of fashion.
◦ One influence of the Metaphysicals is that he is willing to make his poetry unapologetically intellectual. He doesn’t
separate feelings from thought, logic, philosophy, science—much like the Metaphysicals.
2. His project, as he said in the essay on the Metaphysicals is the following:
“The poet must become more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if
necessary, language into his meaning”
◦ why might we need to “dislocate” language in order to get at meaning?
3. One synthesis of points 1& 2 is, as the Norton intro suggests, is:
“his deliberate elimination of all merely connective and transitional passages, his
building up of the total pattern of meaning through the immediate juxtaposition of
images without overt explanation of what they are doing, along with his use of
oblique references to other works of literature (some of them quite obscure to most
readers of his time).”
◦ Can you think of examples of this?

7. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
While you are listening, keep track of two
things:
1. How do you see aspects of Eliot’s style that
we just talked about here?
◦ “Intellectual”
◦ Allusive, indirect, “dislocate” language.
◦ Juxtaposition of images with no explanation or
transition.
2. IN ONE WORD, what is this poem about?

8. Plot summary
“Let us go then, you and I” (1)
Who is he talking to? And what kind of poetic form does this create?
◦ Dramatic monologue!
Where? Where are we going?
◦ “tea and cakes and ices” (79)
◦ “In the room, the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (13-14)
And what will he do when he gets there? What does he want to do?
◦ “To lead you to an overwhelming question…” (10)
Who is he going to ask this question to? Does he do so?
What does he do instead?

9. Time and Temporality
“And indeed there will be time” (37)
For what?
A direct reply to Andrew Marvell
◦ Marvell’s “To Coy Mistress” is all about convincing his mistress that there isn’t time. That she has to
sleep with him NOW.
◦ But in Prufrock’s love song, there is plenty of time. Plenty of time for self-doubt.
But now what happens to time?
“For I have known them already, known them all—” (49; with revisions in 55 and 62).
◦ What is his position in time in these three stanzas?
◦ What has he seen? What has he experienced?
◦ And what is his reaction to it?
◦ “I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (73-74)

10. And then we are back to the afternoon,
to the question…
“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” (80-81)
Does he have the strength?
◦ Why not?
◦ Who is the “eternal Footman”?
”And would it have been worth it, after all,” (87, 99)
Would it have been worth it? What would she have said?
“That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.” (97-98; and a version of this in 109-110).
What kind of person is he? What is his role?
“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be” (111)

11. Acceptance?
I grow old… I grow old...
I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids, singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

12. The failure of heroism
I want to read this poem, then, in the context of
the entire English poetic tradition to date.
◦ tradition that is full of romantic and Romantic
ambition and self-expression.
◦ heroic grandeur
◦ self-assertion
◦ vigor, decisiveness, strength.
And this is a modern “love song”—a love song
that is a failure, a poem in which heroism fails.
Why does heroism fail here? Multiple, related reasons:
Judgment (and fear of judgment):
◦ pinned by a gaze, pinned and wriggling on the wall (56-58)
◦ “They will say…” his hair is growing thin, arms and legs are
thin. (41-44)
The ordinariness and emptiness of modern middle-
class life.
◦ coffeespoons, cigarette butts are the measure of his days.
(51, 60).
◦ the women have tea and cake and chat about art.
There is no place here for the Romantic heroism of the
poetic tradition.
And ultimately, there is a failure of language here:
◦ “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” (104)
◦ Runs through, I suggest, the entire poem.
◦ Not just to her, but to us.