by B.C Southam (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1978), pp. F.R Leavis, “‘Prufrock’, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘Gerontion’ (1932),” in “Prufrock”, “Gerontion”, Ash Wednesday and Other Shorter Poems: A Casebook, ed. His poetry at times appears both conforming, and aggressively challenging tradition. Eliot’s use of quotation is interesting as it is often highly ambiguous whether he is intending to defer to or subvert the authority of the literature he quotes and in fact often appears to be doing one whilst doing the other. Eliot’s use of quotation has been described as a way of connecting his poetry to tradition. Quotation may be used either to defer to the sources authority, or to subvert it through mockery. When Eliot refers to a ‘simultaneous order’ of literary tradition in Tradition and the Individual Talent these works are all part of the canon of literature he is referring to.
Throughout the poem, Eliot makes reference to a wide variety of literature, including works by Dante, Shakespeare, Hesiod, Ecclesiastes, Marvell and Donne, Chaucer and The Gospels. However, although the poem is overtly modernist in its form and themes, Prufrock is not without its ties to tradition. An interest in the internal voices and struggles of characters is a common theme in modernist writing, as opposed to nineteenth century descriptions of the external challenges characters face. Prufrock himself has been described as not so much a character, as a consciousness rising and falling. While John Stuart Mill’s described of poetry as ‘overheard speech,’ can often be readily applied to nineteenth-century poetry Prufrock is better described as overheard inner speech, fragments of thoughts, dream, and memory shifting in and out of focus, held in delicate balance.
#LOVE SONG OF J ALFRED PRUFROCK SERIES#
The fairly conventional opening couplet is followed by the unusual image of an etherized patient, which also breaks up the series of couplets which make up the rest of the stanza.
The famous opening lines:Let us go then, you and I,When the evening is spread out against the skyLike a patient etherized upon a table subvert the reader’s expectations of both form and content. The poem is misleading, setting up certain expectations, and then subverting them. The metre is languid and complex, open to variation and interruption, sometimes hesitant, and sometimes abrupt. Leavis described Prufrock as ‘a complete break with the nineteenth-century tradition, and a new start.’ Certainly Prufrock is written in a distinctly modern form.
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