The Loveong Of J Alfred Prufrock Analysis

Around the beginning of the 20th century, a number of people grew disillusioned with Western Civilization, and began a new school of thought, which became known as modernism. Modernist authors and poets wrote numerous works which were markedly different from those written by their predecessors. This difference was based on the modernists penchant to “[question] the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, and morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving the human self” (Abrams 167). Their ability to examine the world they lived in gave the modernist poets the opportunity to break poetic rules and touch their audiences in a truly original manner. While some might disagree on which of the many different authors and poets of the movement were its best …show more content…
The poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is a perfect example of T.S. Eliot’s reinvention of types of poetry used by his predecessors. In this case, Eliot introduces a variation of a dramatic monologue, which is a type of poem that has been written for centuries. M.H. Abrams identified three key features of a dramatic monologue, and Eliot inverts all three features in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Abrams 70). The first feature Abrams identifies is that the entire poem is the speech of one individual, who is not the poet. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the entire poem is from one individual, Prufrock; however, it is an internal monologue instead of a speech. The second feature is that the dramatic monologue is given to a listener, or listeners, and the speech provides references to what the listener says and does throughout the poem (Abrams 70). As previously mentioned, Eliot transformed the