Transcript Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” ENGL 203 Dr. Fike Quiz Today • Please clear your desks. Eliot and Imagism • Modernism involves imagism, and.

Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock”
ENGL 203
Dr. Fike
Quiz Today
• Please clear your desks.
Eliot and Imagism
• Modernism involves imagism, and this in
turn involves a variety of things:
– Getting rid of the WWian “I”
– Creating clear, objective images to which
readers respond emotionally (cf. Eliot’s
“objective correlative” below)
– Variations in poetic form—poetry no longer
has to have standard rhythm and rhyme: free
verse
Summary
• “Modern poetry must address the modern
world with modern language and images
appropriate to the modern experience,
unfettered by the conventions which had
grown up over the centuries.”
• Source:
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~mcneil/m4lec13a.h
tm
Example of an Imagist Poem
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound
“Prufrock” and Periodicity
• Eliot’s poem illustrates Imagism.
• It also reflects the fragmentation resulting
from World War I (1914-18): parallel to
suppression of “the links in the chain,” the
technique he uses in The Wasteland.
Mini-Quiz
Which one of the following does not fit?
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
Casanova
Romeo
Don Juan
Sirano de Bergerac
J. Alfred Prufrock
Answer
• E: J. Alfred Prufrock
• But, more importantly, how did you
know that?
Answer
• You know love songs because you listen
to them every day.
• You know the names of great lovers
because you are familiar with Western
tradition.
• And you know enough love songs in
Western tradition to know that J. Alfred
Prufrock—a prude in a frock—does not fit
with the other figures.
Point
• To be a good reader of “Prufrock,” you
have to know something about western
tradition. This is very similar to what Eliot
says about western tradition in his essay,
“Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
Page 2014/506
• The par. begins, “Yet if the only form of
tradition….”
• What is Eliot’s point in this par.?
Answer
• “History and tradition are not static
artifacts that exist only in the past; they are
also present in our reading of them and in
the use to which we put them.”
--Dr. Fike
Goals for Today’s Class
1. To examine literary tradition in
connection with “Prufrock.”
2. To do a really close reading of the first
stanza.
3. And to talk about Prufrock’s problems
and about how he ends up.
Section I: Literary Tradition and
“Prufrock”
• What happens in this poem?
• In the literal sense, what does Prufrock
DO?
Answer
• He goes to a party, hoping to ask someone to
marry him, but he lacks the courage to get the
question out.
• This action (one might say “inaction”) is based
on a story by Henry James called “Crapy
Cornelia”: the main character in that story hopes
and intends to ask a woman to marry him, but
because of ambivalence, does not do so.
From “Crapy Cornelia”
• “It was as if he had sat and watched
himself—that came back to him: Shall I
now or shan’t I? Will I now or won’t I?
Say within the next three minutes, say by
a quarter past six, or by twenty minutes
past, at the furthest—always if nothing
more comes up to prevent.”
Points
• Here are the same agony of indecision
and the same lack of conviction that P
expresses.
• The action of the poem—its literal sense—
is borrowed from literary tradition.
• The ambivalence of James’s character
also informs Prufrock, who says, “Do I
dare / Disturb the universe?”
Other Allusions?
• What other allusions did you notice in
the poem?
• Take some time with a partner to search
for allusions to other authors and literary
works.
Allusions in “Prufrock”
• Love songs/great lovers
• Henry James, “Crapy
Cornelia”
• Dante’s Inferno
• Michelangelo
• Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
• Hesiod’s “Works and
Days”
• Shakespeare’s Twelfth
Night
• Shakespeare’s Hamlet
• Mark 6 & Matthew 14 re.
John the Baptist
• Marvell’s “To His Coy
Mistress”
• John 11 re. Lazarus
• Chaucer’s “General
Prologue” and “Clerk’s
Tale”
• Fools in Elizabethan
drama
• Donne’s “Go and Catch a
Falling Star”
The Key Allusions
• Dante and Lazarus
• Michelangelo
• Hamlet
Dante and Lazarus
• “If I thought that my answer were being made to
someone who would ever return to earth, this flame
would remain without further movement; but since no
one has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I
hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy.”
• Source: Guido de Montefeltro, speaking in Dante’s
Inferno, Canto 27
• Why is this an appropriate epigraph?
• What connection can you make between Guido and
Lazarus (line 94)?
Answer
• Prufrock is like Guido: He thinks that he is
damned and that he is talking to someone
who is also damned.
• Lazarus, whom Jesus raises from the
dead, gets a second chance.
• The implication is that there will be no
such second chance for Prufrock: like
Guido, he will stay in hell.
Michelangelo (1475-1564)
• What do you know about
Michelangelo?
Factoids
• Michelangelo was a Renaissance man: painter, sculptor,
poet, architect.
• A. L. Rowse describes him as “all too virile and obvious,
a powerful and stunning personality” who “imposed his
extrovert brute force upon all around him” (vs. Prufrock’s
timidity).
• His most famous sculpture was “David,” “the prime
statement of the Renaissance ideal of perfect humanity”
(Britannica) vs. Prufrock’s appearance.
– http://vlsi.colorado.edu/~rbloem/david.html: contains male
frontal nudity
– Prufrock: See lines 40, 44, 82, and 120-21.
More on “David”
• Rowse 17: “Actually, there is an ambivalence in the
conception of this marvelous work, the kind of duality
within one mind from which it springs. For Michelangelo
it was an idealization of himself, the kind of self he would
have liked to be; but also it was a projection, conscious
or unconscious, of his own desires. There is no sexual
response to women in the whole of Michelangelo’s work,
any more than there is in Leonardo’s. And yet, all art is
intimately connected with the sexual urge. Here [in
‘David’] is Michelangelo’s type: sexual appeal stands
revealed in the whole stance, in every limb and curve
and muscle, perhaps especially in the large strong
hands.”
Points in the Rowse Quotation
• Michelangelo was a homosexual.
• “David” represents two things:
– An expression of Michelangelo’s ideal selfimage
– A projection of his own desires
• Source: A. L. Rowse, Homosexuality in
History: A Study of Ambivalence in
Society, Literature and the Arts
Question
• What does any of this have to do with
Prufrock?
Possible Answers
• Prufrock does not feel secure because he
does not look manly.
• His sexuality may be ambivalent: the
women’s talk of Michelangelo may cut too
close to P’s hidden desires; perhaps their
remarks activate his sexual ambivalence.
• Therefore, for these two reasons, he does
not ask his question.
Hamlet
• Lines 111ff.: Prufrock thinks that he is like
Polonius, not Hamlet.
• He thinks that Hamlet is capable of action,
and this is a good example of how an
author differs from the character whom he
creates.
• Hamlet’s greatest problem is uncertainty
leading to inaction, and Eliot knew this
(next slide).
Eliot on Hamlet
• “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an
emotion which is inexpressible…an
emotion which can find no outlet in
action” (my emphasis).
• POINT: If Prufrock admires Hamlet as a
man of action, and if Hamlet is (for most of
the play) certainly NOT such a man, then
Prufrock himself must be really paralyzed.
“Ulysses, Order, and Myth”
• Eliot’s point in this essay is that
juxtaposing a modern character with
someone famous from literary tradition is a
perfect way to undermine that modern
character.
• This mythical method is partly what Eliot is
up to in the references to Michelangelo
and Hamlet: they illuminate and
undermine Prufrock.
Form: Dramatic Monologue
• The poem’s form is also related to literary
tradition.
• Dramatic monologue: “Prufrock” is the
foremost modern example of this form.
• Characteristics:
– The speaker is caught at a moment of great stress.
– Most of the utterance is gratuitous; the business is
over in line 86: “And in short, I was afraid.”
– Prufrock reveals himself unawares (as does Guido).
– We know something about the listener only by
hearing what the speaker says (like one end of a
phone conversation).
More on Tradition
• In all of the ways above, Eliot uses literary tradition.
• But the poem, in turn, becomes PART of that tradition,
and later works allude to it.
• “I can heard the mermaids singing, each to each”:
– John Donne, “Go and Catch a Falling Star”: “Teach me to hear
mermaids singing”
– I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing: a film about a Prufrock-like
woman who manages to make the transition that he cannot:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093239/
• Blown Away: “I should have been a pair of ragged
claws” (line 73).
• Apocalypse Now? See “The Hollow Men” (491) and
http://youtube.com/watch?v=845Hx3XV9EU.
POINT
• The poem is a hinge between tradition and
popular culture.
• Thus the poem takes its place in the
tradition to which Eliot refers.
• Any literary work can be a Janus figure in
the same way.
Section II: Group Work on the
Opening Stanza
1. To whom is P referring when he says
“you and I”?
2. What kind of associations do you have
with “a patient etherised upon a table”?
3. What is P doing here?
4. What is P’s problem here?
5. How is this a love song gone wrong?
6. How does the poetry act out its
meaning?
Possible Answers
• First 2 lines:
– Typical of a love song
– “you and I”; the “you” may be some other person, the
reader, or an aspect of P himself (he is, after all, a
psyche divided against itself)
• “a patient etherised upon a table”: something is
really wrong: lots of negative associations.
• There are breaks in the rhyme at lines 3 and 10:
“table” and “question” do not rhyme with
anything else. This discordant technique signals
something important.
Energy
• The direction of sexual energy is
downward both spatially and socially:
– “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.”
– The direction of the party is upward: Prufrock
will “descend the stair” (line 39) when he
leaves.
– “The yellow fog” in line 15: fog is linked to
sexual desire in The Wasteland.
– Lines 15ff. echo “Crapy Cornelia”: “‘Well, I am
a cat!’ Cornelia grinned.”
Analogy
The Boston Evening Transcript
THE READERS of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.
When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”
Section III: Prufrock’s Problem and
How He Ends Up
• A conflict between energy and restraint.
• The poem presents images of these two
things.
• With a partner, identify as many of them
as you can.
Energy vs. Restraint
Energy
• Sexual energy (fog)
• 28: “murder”
• 46: “Disturb the universe”
• 82: “my head…brought in
upon a platter” (thought vs.
feeling: what Eliot calls “a
dissociation of sensibility” in
“The Metaphysical Poets” [the
essay appears in your book;
see the 6th page for the term])
• Polonius gets stabbed by
Hamlet
Restraint
• 57-58: “sprawling on a
pin…wriggling on a wall”
• 73: “pair of ragged claws” (i.e.,
pure sensation—no reason)
• 105: “a magic lantern threw
the nerves in patterns on a
screen”
Objective Correlative
• “The only way of expressing emotion in
the form of art is by finding an ‘objective
correlative’; in other words, a set of
objects, a situation, a chain of events
which shall be the formula of the particular
emotion; such that when the external
facts, which must terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked” (Eliot, “Hamlet”).
O.C. and Analogy to Songs
• A pair of lovers has a favorite song.
• You associate specific songs with specific
places and persons.
• Songs function as the auditory equivalent
of the objective correlative.
More on O.C.
• An individual image can be an objective
correlative: e.g., a bug wriggling on a pin
suggests extreme discomfort.
• But Prufrock himself has become an
objective correlative.
• “He’s a Prufrock,” one might say, and the
listener would get the meaning: some guy
is the balding, middle-aged mayor of
Nowheresville.
More on Energy vs. Restraint
• Which wins?
• Lines 122-end.
Possible Answers
• Drowning suggests that restraint wins.
• Drowning is what mermaids do to sailors.
• But Prufrock’s mermaids do not sing to him—
they sing “each to each.”
• The “human voices” wake him, and THEN he
drowns—both parts of him evidently—in the
conscious awareness of his own failure to act.
• POINT: He is utterly overcome by a social
situation and by his own lack of self-esteem.
A Final Element of Tradition
• The concluding tercets parallel terza rima, the rhyme
scheme of the Divine Comedy: interlinked tercets in
which the second line of each tercet rhymes with the first
and third lines of the next: aba bcb cdc etc.
• Eliot’s tercets are NOT terza rima, but they do call
Dante’s verse form to mind.
• Therefore, there is a slight sense that Eliot is framing the
poem with Dante. The implication is that Prufrock, who
is in hell at the beginning (as we know because of the
epigraph), is still in it. He has done nothing to improve
his situation.
END