The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“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 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…

S. Elliot in his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” uses great variety of symbolism and metaphors which support and develop the central message of his poem (here only three will be chosen). One symbol that is shown in the poem multiple times is the room which in many occasions could represent…

emotions: revenge and love. These two emotions are some of the most well known emotions around the world. One could even say you can’t one without the other. Revenge is passionate, and before having revenge we must first fear something (From Hate to Love). We fear things that are different or unknown. And what is one emotion that caused the most fear? Love. Love makes us do some crazy things. Strangely, love feeds into fear which consequently feeds into revenge and anger (From Hate to love).…

1915. It uses the dramatic monologue style, where the readers are only silent listeners. It is tempting to think that the poet , Eliot, is describing his own life through the character of Prufrock but the stark differences between young Eliot ( at the time he wrote the poem) and a balding ,middle-aged Prufrock, negate this assumption. Eliot also used the literary technique of fragmentation, which was popular in his time. The poets of his time used fragmentation in their poems, to represent the…

“The Speech of Polly Baker” by Benjamin Franklin is a leading example of how American writers challenged notions of social injustice and attempted to bring social change. Franklin writes this fictional story about a woman being convicted for giving birth to an illegitimate child and criticizes the laws that punish them. Polly Baker has been convicted of this same crime four times previously but each time, argues that she is not the only one responsible for this transgression. Women are…

In the ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, T.S Eliot gives the readers a view through a twenty-two-year-old modernist, around the beginning of World War 1, set in a bedraggled, populous city and its persona is represented by an extremely caliginous man under the name of Prufrock. He is depicted as one that is afraid of living and hence is continually procrastinating. In contrast, ‘Mirror’, written by Sylvia Plath in 1961, around two years before her suicide, carries one into the mind of a woman…

is the present time for the man who oughts to believe his mind and soul are rich in color. Yet in all sensibility, he too is a foreigner who lacks zeal for life- unknown to the outside world. The mysterious speaker in T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”, became frozen in a chain of disillusionment towards the new world, but is also blinded by his own creation of a cracked illusion that confides in solitary life that he believes is pure. Haunted by self-doubt and nostalgia of a past…

disassociation in living deliberately in time and place of Nick and J. Alfred Prufrock. Ernest Hemingway’s story Big Two-Hearted River tells the story of a young man who returns to his old fishing hole after the war. Nick, is his name and he returns home faced with some of the same feeling and thoughts of war. Although, he did have…

made when we are youthful, however we can also make them as adults. Our creative ability builds up an account of our self and we envision our self in diverse parts. It can be of a win, or of disappointment and dismissal. This is exactly what J. Alfred Prufrock is struggling with in his life. It is through envisioning our self in different situations that we make feelings of insecurity. “Do I dare and, do I dare? Time to turn back and descend the stair, with a bald spot in the middle of my hair,…