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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Cover page of The Egoist, Ltd.'s publication of Prufrock and Other Observations
Author	T. S. Eliot
Original title	Prufrock Among the Women
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Poetry
Publisher	Poetry Magazine
Publication date	1915

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is the 1915 poem (The first publication in Britain is 1917^[1] ) that marked the start of T. S. Eliot's career as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets.^[2] The poem, also referred to simply as Prufrock,^[3] is one of the most anthologized 20th century poems in the English language.^[4] The poem takes the form of a dramatic monologue, and uses the "stream of consciousness" literary technique.^[5]

Contents 1 Composition and publication 2 The title 3 The epigraph 4 Interpretation 4.1 Prufrock and Raskolnikov 5 Use of allusion 6 In popular culture 7 References 8 See also 9 External links

[edit] Composition and publication

Composed mainly between February 1910 and July or August 1911, the poem was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Chicago)^[6] after Ezra Pound, the magazine's foreign editor, persuaded Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that Eliot was unique: "He has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other, but never both."^[7] This was Eliot's first publication of a poem outside of school or university publications.

In June 1917, The Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, published a pamphlet entitled Prufrock and Other Observations (London), containing twelve poems by Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was the first poem in the volume.

Eliot's notebook of draft poems (published posthumously in 1996 by Harcourt Brace) includes 38 lines from the middle of a draft version of the poem. This section, now known as Prufrock's Pervigilium, describes the "vigil" of Prufrock through an evening and night.^[8]

[edit] The title

In the drafts, the poem had the subtitle Prufrock among the Women.^[9] Eliot said "The Love Song of" portion of the title came from "The Love Song of Har Dyal," a poem by Rudyard Kipling.^[10] The form of Prufrock's name is like the name that Eliot was using at the time: T. Stearns Eliot.^[11] It has been suggested that Prufrock comes from the German word "Prüfstein" meaning "touchstone".^[12]

There was a "Prufrock-Littau Company" in St Louis at the time Eliot lived there, a furniture store; in a 1950 letter, Eliot said, "I did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any recollection of having acquired this name in any way, but I think that it must be assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated."^[13]

[edit] The epigraph

In context, the epigraph refers to a meeting between Dante and Guido da Montefeltro, who was condemned to the eighth circle of Hell for providing false counsel to Pope Boniface VIII. This encounter follows Dante's meeting with Ulysses, who himself is also condemned to the circle of the Fraudulent. According to Ron Banerjee, the epigraph serves to cast ironic light on Prufrock's intent. Like Guido, Prufrock had intended his story never be told, and so by quoting Guido, Eliot reveals his view of Prufrock's love song.^[14]

Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from multiple personalities of sorts, and that he embodies both Guido and Dante in the Inferno analogy. One is the storyteller; the other the listener who later reveals the story to the world. He posits, alternatively, that the role of Guido in the analogy is indeed filled by Prufrock, but that the role of Dante is filled by you, the reader, as in "Let us go then, you and I," (1). In that, the reader is granted the power to do as he pleases with Prufrock's love song.^[15]

Although he finally chose not to use it, the draft version of the epigraph for the poem came from Dante's Purgatorio (XXVI, 147-148):

'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor'.

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.

Eliot provided this translation in his essay "Dante" (1929):

'be mindful in due time of my pain'.

Then dived he back into that fire which refines them.

The quotation that Eliot did choose comes from Dante also. Inferno (XXVII, 61-66) reads:

S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo

Non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,

Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

One translation from the Princeton Dante Project is:

"If I thought my answer were given

to anyone who would ever return to the world,

this flame would stand still without moving any further.

But since never from this abyss

has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true,

without fear of infamy I answer you."^[16]

[edit] Interpretation

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As it shows us only surface thought and images, it is considered difficult to interpret exactly what is going on in the poem. Laurence Perrine wrote, "[the poem] presents the apparently random thoughts going through a person's head within a certain time interval, in which the transitional links are psychological rather than logical".^[5] This stylistic choice makes it difficult to determine exactly what is literal and what is symbolic. On the surface, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" relays the thoughts of a sexually frustrated middle-aged man who wants to say something but is afraid to do so, and ultimately does not.^[5][17] The dispute, however, lies in who Prufrock is talking to, whether he is actually going anywhere, what he wants to say, and to what the various images refer.

First of all, it is not evident to whom the poem is addressed. Some believe that Prufrock is talking to another person^[18] or directly to the reader,^[19] while others believe Prufrock's monologue is internal. Perrine writes "The 'you and I' of the first line are divided parts of Prufrock's own nature",^[5] while Mutlu Konuk Blasing suggests that the "you and I" refers to the relationship between the dilemmas of the character and the author.^[20] Similarly, critics dispute whether Prufrock is going somewhere during the course of the poem. In the first half of the poem, Prufrock uses various outdoor images (the sky, streets, cheap restaurants and hotels, fog), and talks about how there will be time for various things before "the taking of toast and tea", and "time to turn back and descend the stair." This has led many to believe that Prufrock is on his way to an afternoon tea, in which he is preparing to ask this "overwhelming question".^[5] Others, however, believe that Prufrock is not physically going anywhere, but rather, is playing through it in his mind.^[19][20]

Perhaps the most significant dispute lies over what the "overwhelming question" is that Prufrock is trying to ask. Many believe that Prufrock is trying to tell a woman his romantic interest in her,^[5] pointing to the various images of women's arms and clothing and the final few lines in which Prufrock laments that the mermaids will not sing to him. Others, however, believe that Prufrock is trying to express some deeper philosophical insight or disillusionment with society, but fears rejection, pointing to statements that express a disillusionment with society such as "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" (line 51). Many believe that the poem is a criticism of Edwardian society and Prufrock's dilemma represents the inability to live a meaningful existence in the modern world.^[21] McCoy and Harlan wrote "For many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment."^[19]

Finally, readers and critics are not sure what the many images refer to and what they represent. For example, "yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes" (line 15) has been interpreted as many things, from symbolism for the decline of society (in a similar manner as the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby, another Modernist work),^{[citation needed]} to a reference to the behaviour of a cat.^[22] As the poem uses the stream of consciousness technique, it is often difficult to determine what is meant to be interpreted literally and what is symbolic, what is actual and what is subconscious imagery or both. In general, Eliot uses imagery which is indicative of Prufrock's character,^[5] representing aging and decay. For example, "When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table" (lines 2-3), the "sawdust restaurants" and "cheap hotels," the yellow fog, and the afternoon "Asleep...tired... or it malingers" (line 77), are reminiscent of languor and decay, while Prufrock's various concerns about his hair and teeth, as well as the mermaids "Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black," show his concern over aging.

[edit] Prufrock and Raskolnikov

John C. Pope has postulated that Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock is connected to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment. While Dostoevsky "caught the undercurrent of stifled suffering" in the "withering life of cities", Pope suggests that Prufrock is a victim of "stifled suffering," while the "withering life of cities" is more referential to the slow demise of fashionable society.^[23][24]

[edit] Use of allusion

Like many of Eliot's poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" makes numerous allusions to other works, which are often symbolic in and of themselves.^[5] Laurence Perrine identifies the following allusions in the poem:

• In "Time for all the works and days of hands" (29) the phrase 'works and days' is the title of a long poem - a description of agricultural life and a call to toil - by the early Greek poet Hesiod.
• "I know the voices dying with a dying fall" (52) echoes Orsino's first lines in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
• The prophet of "Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter / I am no prophet - and here's no great matter" (81-2) is John the Baptist, whose head was delivered to Salome by Herod as a reward for her dancing (Matthew14:1-11, and Oscar Wilde's play Salome).
• "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (92) echoes the closing lines of Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'.
• "'I am Lazarus, come from the dead'" (94) may be either the beggar Lazarus (of Luke 16) who was not permitted to return from the dead to warn the brothers of a rich man about Hell or the Lazarus (of John 11) whom Christ raised from the dead, or both.
• "Full of high sentence" (117) echoes Chaucer's description of the Clerk of Oxford in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.^[25]
• "There will be time to murder and create" is a biblical allusion to Ecclesiastes 3.

Johan Schimanski identifies these:

• In the final section of the poem, Prufrock rejects the idea that he is Prince Hamlet suggesting that he is merely "an attendant lord" (112) whose purpose is to "advise the prince" (114), a likely allusion to Polonius. Prufrock also brings in a common Shakespearean element of the Fool, as he claims he is also "Almost, at times, the Fool."
• "Among some talk of you and me" may be a reference to Quatrain 32 of Edward FitzGerald's first translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam ("There was a Door to which I found no Key / There was a Veil past which I could not see / Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE / There seemed - and then no more of THEE and ME.")^[26]

[edit] In popular culture

The poem is quoted several times in the film Apocalypse Now.^{[citation needed]}

The 1987 Canadian cult film "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing," directed by Patricia Rozema, centers on a social misfit and photographer named Polly Vandersma, played by Sheila McCarthy. The movie title is taken from a line of the poem, "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me." (Although Eliot himself took this image from a poem by John Donne, "Song: Go and catch a falling star.")

Crash Test Dummies, a Canadian folk band, refer to the poem and Eliot in their song "Afternoons & Coffeespoons."

Grayson Capps, a blues-rock artist from New Orleans, alludes to themes and images from the poem in his song "The Love Song for Bobby Long."

Many years after reading a Prufrock parody, The Love Song of J. Arthur Nickles, by John A. Nickles, new media artist Camille Dumas incorporated a fragment of the parody into her piece titled 32: 1.618033989....

The Raine Maida song "Yellow Brick Road", from the 2007 album The Hunters Lullaby, contains the line "We measured our lives in coffee spoons", which is a reference to the poem.

In the 2002 movie, Till Human Voices Wake Us, directed by Michael Petroni, (the movie title coming from a line in Prufrock) a man encounters a mysterious woman who reminds him of someone from his past. She is indeed the ghost of his past love. Throughout the film, references to Eliot's poem are made either directly or indirectly through character dialog. Further thematic links are made between the two works through the use of metaphorical imagery representative of aging, death, and decay.

The title character in Sebastian Faulks' Engleby is nicknamed Prufrock by one of his colleagues.

Frank Turner has a song entitled "I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous" on his album Love, Ire and Song.

In 1974, Ambrosia, a rock group under the wings of Alan Parsons, wrote, "why must we continually disturb the Universe with decisions and revision which a minute will reverse?". The song was titled Time Waits for No One, from their first album.

James McLure's one-act play "Private Wars" features the character Natwick discussing Prufrock with another character, Woodruff Gately. Natwick makes reference to the "peach" section of the poem.

In the novel The Austere Academy, by Lemony Snicket, the Baudelaire orphans attend a boarding school named Prufrock Preparatory School.

Neil Gaiman's novel Anansi Boys alludes to Prufrock by way of references to peaches and mermaids smattered throughout the narrative.

[edit] References

Specific references

Other sources

• Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949.
• Gallup, Donald. T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended Edition) pp. 23, 196 (Harcourt Brace & World 1969)
• Luthy, Melvin J. The Case of Prufrock's Grammar. (1978) College English, 39, 841-853.
• Soles, Derek. The Prufrock Makeover. (1999). The English Journal, 88, 59-61.
• Walcutt, Charles Child. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". (1957). College English, 19, 71-72.

[edit] See also

• Modernism
• Ezra Pound
• Symbolism
• Portrait of a Lady (poem)

[edit] External links

• J. Alfred Prufrock Study Guide Annotated Text, Themes, Study Questions, and More
• Eliot's Prufrock Text and extended audio discussion of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
• Audio of T. S. Eliot reading the poem aloud
• Prufrock and Other Observations at Project Gutenberg