T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” features J. Alfred Prufrock, a presumably middle-aged indecisive man. He invites the reader along with him to journey through the modern city. It is a free-flowing dramatic poem in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of themselves while describing a situation. “Prufrock” marked a literary shift between nineteenth-century poetry and twentieth-century poetry. Challenging the previous stylings of the Romantic period, Eliot demonstrated the move from individual to universal understanding. In lines 1-12 and 122-131 of the poem, Eliot includes a fragmentary cityscape and emphasizes the impact of a social construct on an individual.
The speaker’s dreaminess and inability to keep their
The speaker’s dreaminess and inability to keep their