The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock Analysis

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a publisher, essayist and most importantly, a well-known poet. He was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri in the United States. Even though he was of American origin, nowadays he plays an extremely important role in British literature since he obtained British citizenship in 1927. As a young intellectual looking for his place in the world, life brought him to Oxford in 1914. Although he liked Oxford, because of his restless spirit he was not satisfied there so he often escaped to London. This city played a great role in Eliot´s life because there he met Ezra Pound, a figure which had a major influence on Eliot´s further growth as a person and as a poet as well.

The saying “less is more” describes this intellectual very correctly. He wrote very little but he always
Alfred Prufrock”. This poem was published in June 1915 in the “Poetry: A Magazine of Verse” with the help of his close friend Ezra. The epigraph of the poem is a quotation from Dante Alighieri´s Divine Comedy, from the first of the three canticas, Inferno. The reason for that is Eliot´s obsession and extensive reading of Dante at that time. Eliot´s poetry, including “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is the combination of past and modern time. The modern is usually front and center of his work and it is completed with different allusions to the past, such as William Shakespeare, the Greeks and more. By form, “Prufrock” is a variation on the dramatic monologue which means it is “a poem written in the form of a speech of an individual character, it compresses into a single vivid scene a narrative sense of the speaker’s history and psychological insight into his character” (The Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014). A specific individual who gives us a psychological insight into his character is in this case J. Alfred Prufrock. What sort of a man is J. Alfred Prufrock