T. S. Eliot’s Modernist Techniques in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Abstract

This paper explores T. S. Eliot’s modernist techniques in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) acclaimed as the first poem in Modernism constructed upon Baudelaire’s concept of modernity. The representative modernist poet Eliot is incomparably different from the Romantic or Victorian poets, influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis which classifies the human self into the Id, the Ego and the Super-ego, and by Jamesian “stream of consciousness.” Through the “interior monologue” or daydream of the prudent and indecisive Prufrock, Eliot remarkably presents “alienation” in urban life, a theme of Modernism by describing the incommunicative speaker who is unable to have a rendezvous with the sensual women in his unconsciousness. Furthermore, the poet superbly depicts psychological time in Prufrock’s consciousness rather than mechanical or chronological time under the influence of the Bergsonian concept of time. Eliot’s modernist technique also is obviously displayed through the peculiar metaphor, simile, metonymy, symbol, and the more complex conceit than the conceit of the metaphysical poets. In conclusion, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” projecting the speaker’s vacillating (un)consciousness or subconsciousness is indeed the first innovative modernist poem bridging the chasm between his conventional Harvard juvenilia and the modernist masterpiece The Waste Land.