Position paper The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock Essays

Position paper: The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland T. S. Eliot - a famous poet and essayist, awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of the two poems mentioned above. They both are great representatives of the Modernist movement. The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock is a poem published in 1915, which automatically indicates the period of the WW I. Ezra Pound is the man who actually encouraged the publication of the poem. The work itself is full of references to the Bible, as well as Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare and John Donne. Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique. This poem is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action. The poem begins with an epigraph from Dante's Inferno spoken by Guido da Montefeltro, and that is the frame of the whole poem which is very important for the understanding of the poem itself. The speaker is a deceptive narrator who, in different parts of the poem, can be romantic, desperate and also sad, lonely man. The rhyme is irregular, there are shifts between the past and the future and this is actually a passive poem si nce nothing actually happens - there is no great action. A poem consisting numerous similes, synedoches, imagery, metaphors, sarcasm. In the first stanza of the poem we can found a reference to gas, also there is no romance, only a sort of invitation to accept the brutality of life. Some problem in communication seems obvious, there is no romanticized picture. In the first stanza, the third line (,Like a patient etherised upon a table;") is what gives complexity to the poem. The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock is where the whole reality is dislocated, displaced, and that is revealed by cuts of the images. Uncertainty is also one of the key things here since the speaker himself does not know what he wants, but there is also the uncertainty of every sort of moevement, expression, etc. The second stanza is the one which repeats itself throughout the poem a few times, mentioning women, room and Michelangelo, and with that stanza Eliot almost seems like mocking us. This ca n be analyzed as the way how writer wants to persuade us to give up from the poem since it is very complex, but at the same time he wants us to continue, to ask questions about everything. The yellow fog and the yellow smoke (mentioned in 3rd and 4th stanza) are associated with a gas mask, which was actually a symbol of WW I. As I have already mentioned, there are some references to Dante's Inferno especially because of the theme of going to hell because of love. In the poem there are also 'battles' between individual and society, and also the preoccupation with time - time represents the circle of life, and we both have and do not have enough time! In the poem everything seems simply jumbled up, there is no cohesion. Prufrock is a man with the inability to translate his thoughts into words and feelings for others. Laurence Perrine described the poem as consisting of , the apparently random thoughts going through a person's head within a certain time interval, in which the transitional links are psychological rather than logical , " which actually summarizes everything in a sentence. In the end, he asked questions but he had never answered them, and he became an old, sad man, whose life has passed. The Wasteland is another Eliot's great poem which is usually regarded as the cen tral work of Modernist poetry. Published in 1922, consisting of 434 lines, this work is not a dramatic monologue in its entirety, but is considered an epic. This is an epic because it fulfills the following criteria / characteristics: -a long narrative poem, -seroiusness, -high-position characters, -vast setting, -supernatural intervention, -the importance of the story for a nation . The Wasteland can also be considered as a kind of a patchwork, as the poem is fragmented. This fragmentation reflects the (speaker's) state of mind: overwhelmed with worries, inable to focus on one thing, thus creating