What others have said about The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

J. Hillis Miller Yale University

1. Prufrock's paralysis follows naturally from this subjectivizing of everything. If

each consciousness is an opaque sphere, then Prufrock has no hope of being
understood by others. "No experience," says Bradley in a phrase Eliot quotes,
"can lie open to inspection from outside" (KE, 203). Prufrock's vision is
incommunicable, and whatever he says to the lady will be answered by, "That is
not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all" (CP, 6). The lady is also imprisoned
in her own sphere, and the two spheres can never, like soap bubbles, become
one. Each is impenetrable to the other.

If other consciousnesses exist only as opaque objects for Prufrock, he has an

equally unhappy relation to time and space. One of the puzzles of the poem is
the question as to whether Prufrock ever leaves his room. It appears that he
does not, so infirm is his will, so ready "for a hundred indecisions,/And for a
hundred visions and revisions,/Before the taking of a toast and tea" (CP, 4). In
another sense Prufrock would be unable to go anywhere, however hard he tried.
If all space has been assimilated into his mind, then spatial movement would
really be movement in the same place, like a man running in a dream. There is
no way to distinguish between actual movement and imaginary movement.
However far Prufrock goes, he remains imprisoned in his own subjective space,
and all his experience is imaginary. It seems to be some perception of this which
keeps him in his room, content to imagine himself going through the streets,
ascending the lady's stair, and telling her "all," like Lazarus back from the dead.
There is no resurrection from the death which has undone him, and this is one
meaning of the epigraph from Dante.

Time disappears in the same way. Space must be exterior to the self if
movement through it is to be more than the following of a tedious argument in
the mind. In the same way only an objective time can be other than the self, so
that the flow of time can mean change for that self. But time, like space, has only
a subjective existence for Prufrock. As a result, past, present, and future are
equally immediate, and Prufrock is paralyzed. Like one of Bradley's finite
centers, he "is not in time," and "contains [his] own past and future" (KE, 205).
Memories, ironic echoes of earlier poetry, present sensations, anticipations of
what he might do in the future ("I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the
bottoms of my trousers rolled" [CP, 71)--these are equally present. There is a
systematic confusion of tenses and times in the poem, so that it is difficult to tell
if certain images exist in past, present, future. Prufrock begins by talking of his
visit to the lady as something yet to be done, and later talks of his failure to
make the visit as something long past ("And would it have been worth it, after
all,/Would it have been worth while" (CP, 61). Like the women talking of
Michelangelo, he exists in an eternal present, a frozen time in which everything
that might possibly happen to him is as if it had already happened: "For I have
known them all already, known them all" (CP, 4). In this time of endless
repetition Prufrock cannot disturb the universe even if he should presume to try
to do so. Everything that might happen is foreknown, and in a world where only
one mind exists the foreknown has in effect already happened and no action is
possible. Prufrock's infirmity of will is not so much a moral deficiency as a
consequence of his subjectivism.

From Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: The

Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1965.

2. This is the situation to which romanticism in poetry and idealism in

philosophy have brought Eliot. Each man seems destined to remain
enclosed in his separate sphere, unable to break out to external things,
to other people, to an objective time and space, or to God. All these
exist, but as qualifications of the inner world which is peculiar and
private to the self.

Perhaps it will be possible to accept this situation and make a tolerable

life out of it. Instead of beating futilely against the walls of its prison,
the self should turn within, inspect the contents of inner space, and try
to reduce them to harmony. Though all things are only modes of the self
they do have at least that form of existence. If they can be put in
patterned order the self, though still isolated, will be like a little world
made cunningly. A world of this sort, the universe squeezed into a ball,
may not possess God as the immanent principle of its order, but it may
have that secondary form of possession which is called resonance.

The notion of attunement is of great importance for Eliot. It is one

reason why he gives so much value to formal design. Pattern is not so
much a good in itself as it is a means of reaching the otherwise
unattainable stillness at the center. The finite self is hopelessly
peripheral, but if its elements can be brought into order they may
vibrate, though at an infinite distance, in harmony with the divine
pattern. This bringing into order is Eliot's fundamental definition of art.
Though art and religion are always to be distinguished, art is not an end
in itself. It can take man only part of the way toward salvation, but its
reason for being is precisely to take him that part of the way. This it
does through an ordering of reality which leads to an artistic stillness
oriented toward the divine stillness and echoing it.

This is the meaning of Eliot's most explicit definition of the use of art:
"For it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order
upon ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of an order
in reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness, and
reconciliation; and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward
a region where that guide can avail us no farther" (OPP, 94). The
passage is another version of an ambiguity basic in romanticism from
Keats and Shelley to Yeats. just as Yeats, in Ideas of Good and
Evil, cannot decide whether the poet "creates" or "reveals" his symbols,
so art for Eliot imposes pattern in order to reveal one which has been
there invisibly all along. This pre-existent order is shy to reveal itself
and can be brought to light only by a created order, the "musical
design" (OPP, 80) of art. The pattern in reality may be there already,
but it is brought into being for human beings only through art. Art is
the Virgil who leads us to the borders of that realm where only Beatrice
can lead us farther. Such a notion of art as design vibrating in
resonance with the divine stillness is, in "Burnt Norton," admirably
expressed in the image of the Chinese jar:

Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Abandoning his impotent yearning to escape from himself, the poet

turns inward to search within his own sphere for the patterns which
may grant him an indirect possession of the divine harmony. It may be
that the inner world of the isolated ego falls naturally into orderly
design.

From Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Cambridge, MA:

The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. 1965.

David Spurr University of Geneva

This five-line interlude ending on "the floors of silent seas" forms an

encapsulated version of the remainder of the poem, in which the frustrated
effort to establish purposive discourse leads once again to withdrawal downward
and inward to a silent world of instinctual being. A return to images of
distension and distracting sensuality provokes a final impulse toward violent
imposition of the will--"to force the moment to its crisis"--which ends, like
previous thoughts of disturbing the universe, in ruthless self-mockery. The
image of decapitation parodies the theme of disconnected being and provides for
at least a negative definition of the self: "I am no prophet."

By this point the tense has quietly shifted from present to past, and the speaker
offers a series of prolonged interrogatives on the consequences of action not
taken. While its grammatical context ("And would it have been worth it")
reduces it to the contemplation of "what might have been"; the language and
imagery of this passage enact with renewed intensity the recurring drama of
mental conflict:
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all."

The infinitives in this passage--to have bitten, to have squeezed, to roll--conform

to the poem's widespread use of transitive verbs of direct action in expressing
the speaker's violent impulse to combat the forces of disorder: to murder and
create, to disturb the universe, to spit out all the butt-ends, to force the moment.

The poem's linguistic and thematic strategy consistently opposes active verbs to
the passive voice which causes things to be spread out, etherized, smoothed,
and stretched. It sets these infinitives against present participles, which are
constantly muttering, sprawling, rubbing, scuttling, and settling. Finally, it
opposes these transitive verbs to intransitive verbs which lie, linger, malinger,
lean, curl, trail, wrap, slip, and sleep. A relative lack of modifiers and the
absence of plural forms further distinguishes the passage cited above. By
contrast the language of disordered experience, of imprecision and aimlessness,
abounds in modifiers and plurals: restless nights, one-night cheap hotels, visions
and revisions, the sunsets and the dooryards, and the sprinkled streets.

The structure of the imagery at this point in the poem corresponds to the
thematic role played by linguistic form. To have "bitten off" the matter, in
addition to its hint of blunt force, would constitute a positive reaction against
endlessly idle talk; squeezing the universe into a ball would counteract the
world's tendency to fall apart and to spread itself out like yellow fog; finally, the
act of rolling it toward some overwhelming question at least imparts direction to
the movement of the universe, even if the actual destination, like the question,
remains unclear. The idea of proclaiming oneself a prophet "come back to tell
you all" implies a power of linguistic discourse equal in magnitude to the
physical act of squeezing the universe into a ball. Once more the idea of
language joins with images of purpose, only this time in such hyperbolic fashion
that the ultimate failure of discourse strikes one as inevitable: "That is not what
I meant at all."

The speaker's failure to master language--"It is impossible to say just what I

mean!"--leads in this case not to a statement on the inadequacy of words
themselves, but rather reflects upon the speaker's own impotence. In a poem so
obsessed with problems of speech and definition, to have failed with words is to
have lost the war on the inarticulate: the speaker as heroic Lazarus or Prince
Hamlet is suddenly reduced to the stature of an attendant lord, "Full of high
sentence, but a bit obtuse." The old man with rolled-up trouser bottoms has
shrunk from his former size. Paradoxically, this diminution of the outer self--the
part of the mind concerned with imposing order on experience--brings about a
corresponding expansion of the inner self.

In the same essay where Eliot locates the beginnings of a poem in an unknown,
dark "psychic material" that is put into form by the conscious mind, he allows for
a secondary resurgence of the unconscious that arises from the very process of
poetic composition: "the frame, once chosen, within which the author has
elected to work, may itself evoke other psychic material; and then, lines of
poetry may come into being, not from the original impulse, but from a secondary
stimulation of the unconscious mind." The mental forces at work in Eliot's
description of the poetic process serve as an analogy to the conflicts besetting
the speaker in Prufrock. The speaker is a failed poet in terms of his inability to
"murder" existing structures in order to "create" anew; be finds it impossible to
say what be wants to say. In the "secondary stimulation of the unconscious
mind" that occurs at this point, he partly abandons and partly resolves the
struggle of form and matter; the integration of the psyche remains at best
incomplete.

From Conflicts in Consciousness: T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Carol Christ University of Californian Berkeley

It is a striking fact that three of the principal modernist poets--Eliot, Pound, and
Williams--each wrote a poem entitled "Portrait of a Lady" within a few years of
1910. The title, of course, alludes to James’s novel and, for Eliot and Pound,
refers to the Jamesian project of some of their early verse. Pound asserted
that Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was an attempt to condense the James novel, and
Eliot told Virginia Woolf that his early inclination was to develop in the manner
of Henry James. Behind the model of Henry James, however (indeed, behind
James's Portrait of a Lady), is a nineteenth-century poetic mode of female
portraiture. Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, and Swinburne wrote portrait poems
– "Mariana," "'The Gardener's Daughter," "Andrea del Sarto," "The Blessed
Damozel," "The Portrait," and "Before the Mirror," to name just a few -- that
identify poetic style with the portrait of a lady. These poems engage not just the
subject of woman but the gender of the poetical.

[. . . .]

For Eliot, poetic representation of a powerful female presence created difficulty

in embodying the male. In order to do so, Eliot avoids envisioning the female,
indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies.

We can see this process clearly in "The Love Song of J. Prufrock." The poem
circles around not only an unarticulated question, as all readers agree, but also
an unenvisioned center, the "one" whom Prufrock addresses. The poem never
visualizes the woman with whom Prufrock imagines an encounter except in
fragments and in plurals -- eyes, arms, skirts - synecdoches we might well
imagine as fetishistic replacements. But even these synecdochic replacements
are not clearly engendered. The braceleted arms and the skirts are specifically
feminine, but the faces, the hands, the voices, the eyes are not. As if to displace
the central human object it does not visualize, the poem projects images of the
body onto the landscape (the sky, the streets, the fog), but these images, for all
their marked intimation of sexuality, also avoid the designation of gender (the
muttering retreats of restless nights, the fog that rubs, licks, and lingers). The
most visually precise images in the poem are those of Prufrock himself, a
Prufrock carefully composed – "My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to
the chin, / My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin" -- only to be
decomposed by the watching eyes of another into thin arms and legs, a balding
head brought in upon a platter. Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock
are themselves, as Pinkney observes, terrifyingly unstable, attributes
constituting the identity of the subject at one moment only to be wielded by the
objective the next, like the pin that centers his necktie and then pinions him to
the wall or the arms that metamorphose into Prufrock's claws. The poem, in
these various ways, decomposes the body, making ambiguous its sexual
identification. These scattered body parts at once imply and evade a central
encounter the speaker cannot bring himself to confront, but in the pattern of
their scattering they constitute the voice that Prufrock feels cannot exist in the
gaze of the other.

From "Gender, Voice, and Figuration in Eliot’s Early Poetry." In Ronald Bush
(Ed. ) T.S. Eliot: The Modernist in History. Cambridge University Press.

Mutlu Konuk Blasing Brown University

The physical and psychological enervation of Eliot's early personae may be read
in part as correlatives of his literary situation; this is the way Prufrock, for
example, states his problem:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

Prufrock does not know how to presume to begin to speak, both because he
knows "all already"—this is the burden of his lament—and because he is already
known, formulated. His consciousness of the other's eye—I haunts his language
at its source: "Let us go then, you and I." An "I" who addresses a "you" becomes
subject to the laws of communication, and his voice is subsumed by expression.
In his critical replay of the poetic process, Eliot remarks that the poet expresses
not a personality but a particular medium. The particular medium expressed in
"Prufrock" is a confession or a dramatic monologue. The you-I split being the
formal ground of his medium, Prufrock's problem is in fact the problem the
expressive medium introduces, and this identification of the formal and
rhetorical dimensions of the medium with the emotion or psychic burden of the
speaker makes for the airless closure of the poem. As in Poe's "Raven," the
speaker's relationship to the form within which his adventure transpires
constitutes the nature of his adventure: his form determines the content of his
story.

And if Prufrock's problem coincides with the dynamics of Eliot's particular

medium of dramatic monologue, Eliot's problem coincides with the dynamics of
the poetic medium itself; just as Prufrock is paralyzed by his consciousness of
the other, his author is paralyzed by his consciousness of the tradition. In the
line "It is impossible to say just what I mean!" the dramatic character and his
author meet, "uttering the words in unison, though perhaps with somewhat
different meaning," and displaying the rhetorical advantage a dramatic poet
holds. And Eliot's imprisoning his speaker in the very medium of expressive or
even confessional speech may register his own intertextual interment in a
medium inscribed with prototypes of original or central speech—whether
prophetic, like John the Baptist's, or epic, like Dante's, or dramatic, like
Shakespeare's—which are codified in and reinforced by conventions precluding
the possibility of saying "just what I mean." Eliot's ironic use of rhyme and meter
in "Prufrock" acknowledges the complicity of the poet's conventions with his
persona's "de-meaning" language. On the one hand, the "comic" meter of lines
like "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" equates
poetic forms that channel force and the social forms of keeping conversation
light. On the other hand, dreams of escape from the pre-formulating formulae
are them- selves recounted in formulaic lines, for the solution to Prufrock's
problem would be a "solution" for Eliot as well-forgetting the present and the
separate self, surrendering to the oblivion of an unconscious nature and the
"natural" meter of English poetry:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

The epigraph to "Prufrock" formally subsumes its hero's problem with expressive
language to the poet's problem with textuality. The poem is a dramatic
monologue, a mimesis of speech, yet it opens with an epigraph that identifies it
as writing and diminishes its urgency by absorbing it within the prototype of
another confession, so that the beginning "let us go" is already the "end of
something." At the same time that the epigraph consigns the persona to the
company of his "semblables"—all those confined in the deadly circle of their
solipsistic-confessional speech-likenesses—it seals the poet in the prison of
literary "truth," which cancels out his life and tells someone else's "lie."
Supernatural vision and natural blindness—issuing in prophetic or lyric
utterances—would alike deliver Prufrock from himself; but such ascents and
descents are not possible within writing, a historically coded and prescribed
medium where vision drowns in revision and human voices drown out natural
and supernatural music. And if Prufrock—too decorous and conventional to be a
prophet or to dally with mermaids—is incarcerated in the echo chamber of his
and others' chatter, Eliot finds himself locked in the "room" of literary "talk," too
late to "tell all" or to "sing." The poem's epigraph at once opens and closes this
discourse of a poet-hero generically old before his time. Eliot's early work is
unusual in its dependence on epigraphs that mediate between the poet and the
poem, preformulating the poem before it can begin, and his epigraphs often
explicitly concern belatedness, exhaustion, and endings. Indeed, the epigraph
to Prufrock and Other Observations locates Eliot's beginning as a poet by
placing him in the company of Jean Verdenal and other "shadows"—Statius,
Virgil, and Dante. In "Prufrock," the literary epigraph, bespeaking "not only . . .
the pastness of the past, but . . . its presence" (SW, 49), casts such a shadow
over the poem that nature itself disappears, for a "sky" that recalls "ether" is, in
fact, "etherized" for the present speaker. Thus, social paralysis resulting from
knowing all and being known or seen through parallels a literary anesthesia—
knowing all predecessors and being preformulated and "epigraphed" by them.
Both kinds of anesthesia subject the individual voice to anterior fon11ulas,
forms, and styles.

Prufrock's acute consciousness of his age is thus the classic symptom of Eliot's
philosophical and literary problem. Prufrock's body is presented as a text, for he
literally carries the burden of the past on his body—in the lines, the thinning
hair and arms and legs, and other signs of age that record time's passage. In the
same way, his monologue is a "polylogue," superscribed with quotations,
allusions, and echoes that document the presence of the past. Since existential
experience is subsumed by textual experience in early Eliot, bodily and natural
forms correlate with literary forms. The labyrinthine cities and "corridors" of
history, the sepulchral drawing rooms with their "atmosphere of Juliet's tomb"
(CP, 8), the body aging "on its own," and the formulas of discourse are all
experienced as suffocating incarcerations. They are all modeled as texts, as
stages set and scripts written before the speaker enters to recite his lines. And
attempts to free the individual voice by breaking out of forms register, as in
"Prufrock," only as impulses to dismemberment and suicide.

from American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
Copyright © 1987.

John Paul Riquelme Boston University

The complications of "Prufrock" involve from the poem's beginning a more direct
transformation of the dramatic monologue than does "Gerontion" when the
pronouns that "I" uses suggest the presence of an unspecified listener. In many
dramatic monologues the listener is also not specified, and the reader is invited
to take over the role of listener in a one-sided conversation. In "Prufrock,"
however, it is not clear whether a real conversation is being dramatically
presented, whether the "I" is having an internal colloquy with himself, or
whether the reader is being addressed directly. The "you" that is "I"'s
counterpart stands in two places at once, both inside and outside Prufrock's
mind and inside and outside scenes that can with difficulty be imagined based on
the minimal details provided. The reader's situation resembles the position of
the viewer of Velásquez's "Las Meninas," in which a mirror invites an
identification with the observers of the scene depicted in the painting while the
painting's geometry indicates that the illusion of that identification can be
sustained only by ignoring obvious details. Reader and viewer stand both inside
and outside the frame of an illusion that cannot be sustained.

Two epigraphs from Dante precede and follow the poem's title, one for the entire
volume that takes its name from "Prufrock," the other for the poem itself, which
stands first in the volume. Together they suggest the oscillation and
indeterminacy of Prufrock's position and the reader's. In the first epigraph,
Statius mistakes Virgil's shade for a "solid thing" and forgets momentarily what
he himself is and can do. In the second, Guido da Montefeltro predicates his
address to Dante on the opposite mistake, that Dante is not human and cannot
carry his words further. Like Statius and Guido, the reader who tries to pin down
the indeterminate identities and locations of "you and I" in the poem will always
be mistaken. What is taken for a shade or a figment may be flesh and blood, and
what is taken for living flesh may be only a figment in a perpetual instability that
marks "Prufrock," like "Rhapsody," as the transforming end of a sequence of
poems to which it can be said to belong but some of whose implications it
subverts. The subversion occurs largely through the removal of those
referential, seemingly stable elements of scene and character that contribute to
making the illusion of hearing a personal voice in poetry possible.

Eliot's particular transformation of the dramatic monologue in "Prufrock"

depends on the character of the pronouns "you" and "I," which linguists call
"shifters" because they are mutually defining and depend for their meanings on
the pragmatic context of the discourses in which they occur. Instead of naming
something unchanging, these pronouns indicate positions that can be variously
occupied.

From Harmony of Dissonances: T.S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination.

Copyright © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Michael North UCLA

The general fragmentation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is obvious

and notorious. The poem seems a perfect example of what Terry Eagleton calls
the modern "transition from metaphor to metonymy: unable any longer to
totalize his experience in some heroic figure, the bourgeois is forced to let it
trickle away into objects related to him by sheer contiguity." Everything in
"Prufrock" trickles away into parts related to one another only by contiguity.
Spatial progress in the poem is diffident or deferred, a "scuttling" accomplished
by a pair of claws disembodied so violently they remain "ragged." In the famous
opening, "the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised
upon a table," and the simile makes an equation between being spread out and
being etherised that continues elsewhere in the poem when the evening, now a
bad patient, "malingers, / Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me." There
it "sleeps so peacefully! / Smoothed by long fingers . . . ." This suspension is a
rhetorical as well as a spatial and emotional condition. The "streets that follow
like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent" lead not to a conclusion but to a
question, a question too "overwhelming" even to ask. Phrases like the "muttering
retreats / Of restless nights" combine physical blockage, emotional unrest, and
rhetorical maundering in an equation that seems to make the human being a
combination not of angel and beast but of road-map and Roberts' Rules of Order.

In certain lines, metaphor dissolves into metonymy before the reader's eyes.
"The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes" appears clearly to
every reader as a cat, but the cat itself is absent, represented explicitly only in
parts -- back, muzzle, tongue -- and by its actions -- licking, slipping, leaping,
curling. The metaphor has in a sense been hollowed out to be replaced by a
series of metonyms, and thus it stands as a rhetorical introduction to what
follows. The people in the poem also appear as disembodied parts or ghostly
actions. They are "the faces that you meet," the "hands / That lift and drop a
question on your plate," the "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare," the
"eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase." Prufrock himself fears such a
reduction, to use Kenneth Burke's term for the effect of metonymy. The dread
questions "How his hair is growing thin!" and "But how his arms and legs are
thin" reduce Prufrock to certain body parts, the thinness of which stands in for
the diminution caused by the rhetorical figures. What Prufrock fears has already
been accomplished by his own rhetoric.

In this poem the horror of sex seems to come in part from its power to
metonymize. Like Augustine, Eliot sees sex as the tyranny of one part of the
body over the whole. Though Eliot is far too circumspect to name this part, he
figures its power in his poetry by the rebelliousness of mere members: hands,
arms, eyes. Sexual desire pulls the body apart, so that to give in to it is to suffer
permanent dismemberment. This may account for the odd combination in Eliot's
work of sexual ennui and libidinous violence. The tyranny of one part scatters all
the others, reducing the whole to impotence. In this way, the violence of sex
robs the individual of the integrity necessary to action.

An oddly similar relationship of part to whole governs Prufrock's conception of

time. In a burst of confidence he asserts, "In a minute there is time / For
decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." Yet he seems to quail
before the very amplitude of possibility contained in time, so that all these
decisions and revisions are foreclosed before they can be made. Thus Prufrock's
prospective confidence in the fullness of time becomes a retrospective conviction
that "I have known them an already, known them all: -- / Have known the
evenings, mornings, afternoons. . . ." To know "all" already is to be paralyzed,
disabled, because "all" is not full of possibility but paradoxically empty,
constituted as it is by pure repetition, part on part on part. In a figure that
exactly parallels the bodily metonymies, time becomes a collection of individual
parts, just as the poem's human denizens had been little more than parts: "And I
have known the eyes already, known them all"; "And I have known the arms
already known them all." The instantaneous movement from part to whole, from
eyes, arms, evenings, mornings, to "all," expresses the emptiness between, the
gap between dispersed parts and an oppressive whole made of purely serial
repetition. The very reduction of human beings to parts of themselves and of
time to episodes makes it impossible to conceive of any whole different from this
empty, repetitious "an." As Burke says, metonymy substitutes quantity for
quality, so that instead of living life Prufrock feels "I have measured out my life
with coffee spoons.

from Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Roger Mitchell University of Illinois

J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot's poems. He is the
Representative Man of early Modernism. Shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually
retarded (many have said impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point
of solipsism, as he says, "Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a
progress, start a scene or two." Nothing revealed the Victorian upper classes in
Western society more accurately, unless it was a novel by Henry James, and
nothing better exposed the dreamy, insubstantial center of that consciousness
than a half-dozen poems in Eliot's first book. The speakers of all these early
poems are trapped inside their own excessive alertness. They look out on the
world from deep inside some private cave of feeling, and though they see the
world and themselves with unflattering exactness, they cannot or will not do
anything about their dilemma and finally fall back on self-serving explanation.
They quake before the world, and their only revenge is to be alert.
After Prufrock and Other Observations, poetry started coming from the city and
from the intellect. It could no longer stand comfortably on its old post-Romantic
ground, ecstatic before the natural world.

from A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ed. Jack Myers and David
Wojahan. Copyright © 1991 by Southern Illinois UP.