Portrait of a Lady

Friedrich Nietzsche once spoke about poets as being “shameless with their experiences: they exploit them” (109). This quote most definitely describes one of the most descriptive British poets in the world, John Keats. Autumn is the season of steady decline and sadness, a time of the year when beauty dies and despair takes over. The pride and glory of the people plummets like autumn leaves. However, John Keats believes autumn to be the season of beauty, awe, and tranquility and he backs it up…

Sometimes an individual’s desires cause them to face internal suffering. The poem “For That He Looked Not upon Her” by sixteenth-century English poet George Gascoigne explores this idea through illustrating the reasoning of why a man cannot look into the eyes of the women he once loved anymore. Gascoigne portrays the man in the poem as being hopeless and unable to unhook himself from the passion he has for the women which mesmerized him. Gascoigne depicts his hopelessness, and rather bleak…

Exercise 2: Crux Buster, Harrison’s “On Not Being Milton” In Tony Harrison’s poem “On Not Being Milton” he writes, “my Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (3). According to the footnote, the French phrase comes from the title of Aime Cesaire’s poem about colonized West Indian people and a journey back to their homeland. The translated version would read, “Notebook of a return to one’s land of birth.” The first two lines of this poem set the theme of the speaker returning to his roots in the form…

T.S. Eliot is considered “one of the twentieth century’s major poets”. He was born in the United States, but settled in England in his later years of life. Eliot was heavily influenced by religion and modernism – a new and upcoming type of poetry during the 1910’s. T.S. Eliot’s use of allusions, symbols, theme, and unique compositions of his poems create a signature melancholy, yet aesthetical style. In almost every T.S. Eliot poem, there is a use of allusions, or references to a well-known…

The world has changed geographically, historically, and in scientific ways, but one thing that has remain constant throughout the ages of human existence is love and the struggles that come with it. Such struggles have caused men to do the impossible like cross oceans, travel the world, dance, sing, write, and, perhaps the most daring thing of them all, propose marriage. As seen in the poem by T.S Elliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, love and its complications have plagued humankind…

“Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (Bartle by). The sounds of the last line of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Prufrock couldn’t be farther away from love. By analyzing the themes and imagery along with the overall form of the poem, we will see if this poem has a title that relates to what it represents – a love story. Although the main character in Eliot’s poem uses the word love, this poem is centralized around a human living in a modernized society. The Love Song…

The title of this poem is the first clue in which Eliot provides a characteristic of modernism. The title “suggest the kind of irony that is so typical of modern free verse” (Evans) as “love song” (Byam 822) and “J. Alfred Prufrock” (Byam 822) do not seem to fit in the same line of words. Along with the title, the epigraph, which “portrays a man in hell” (Güven 80), who “reveals details of his life” (Evans). He believes his words won’t be repeated on Earth. In the same way, the reader is…

In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot tells a story of regret, love, and life. J. Alfred Prufrock has a hard time finding true love due to the fact that he has no idea what to do with the short amount of time that he has in life. It isn’t until the end that he realizes he’s getting older and he has wasted his life doing nothing for himself. T.S. Eliot uses Literary Devices in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” to express the meaning of life by using tone and imagery. T.S.…

“And would it have been worth it, after all? Would it have been worth it?” That’s the question- the question that so many of us face every day and a question that is pondered in the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s transcendent use of diction and tone tells the story of an old man who is unhappy with his life and the things that he hadn’t accomplished. The man in the poem is tired of his superficial surroundings and he wishes that he had done something more…

The issue with appearances is that people constantly overlook and judge themselves, which creates a barrier of the reality and the mind. According to Güven, “Eliot implies that nobody shows his real face in this fragmented modern world, and that is the reason why Prufrock needs time to prepare a false face for himself” (Güven 82). Prufrock cannot help but place a barrier between the people and himself due to the pretentious nature of modern people. For example, Prufrock interrupts the poem by…