Alfred Prufrock Research Articles

The Beginning of the Poem: The Epigraph

Theoretically, a poem can begin in any way. What does it mean that in practice, poems often begin in a particular way—that is, by returning to a fragment of some prior thing? We see this in the encore of John Milton’s opening to Lycidas (‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more’); differently, we see this in the widely used convention of the poetic epigraph (for instance, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ begins with six lines from Dante’s Inferno). While there is an established model for understanding the beginning as an act that invokes poetic precedent, this paper seeks to expose the beginning’s logic of return to a broader sense of language that is beyond the remit of poetic tradition as such. With a focus on the epigraph, this paper thinks about the everyday existence of poems and about how this existence relates to ordinary language, asking, how do these different modes of language function together? How does ordinary language collude in the creation of poetry? In its enactment of the passage of language from one mode of existence to another, the beginning of a poem might offer some answers to these questions.

The Reflection of Social Atomism in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The tumultuous history of the twentieth century is known to have witnessed transformative events ranging from World War I to World War II. These events with drastic social and political influences have led to a revival of interest in studying the recesses of human mind in the field of literature. Modernism as a literary movement, especially in the wake of World War I, has had its leading role in exploring human psyche, but has simultaneously become the focal point of numerous discussions with its elusive nature. This contentious aspect of modernism can be said to have become manifest in its tackling the issues of social fragmentation, solipsism and capitalism within literary realm. The entirety of the referred points also falls into the scope of Social Atomism Theory which is believed to have gained prominence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At this point, it must be noted that, one of the most well-known poems of modern period, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, provides an apt site for delving into the concept of social atomism. Relevantly, this article aims to elucidate the ways in which the experiences of Prufrock align with those of an alienated or socially atomised individual.

The descriptive analysis of paratextual elements in the case of poetry translation

Paratextual elements are significant for the construction of meaning in textual analysis. In this context, the role of paratextual elements in poetry translation, which are believed to be challenging or even impossible, is worth analyzing. Delving into the functionality and efficacy of paratextual elements, this study aims to unravel the translation choices within the light of paratextual uses in the field of poetry translation. Through the case study of Cem Yavuz’s translation of T. S. Eliot’s poetry, the study qualitatively analyzes the types of paratextual elements that are mainly provided at the notes section, the preface and a YouTube interview. Commenting on T. S. Eliot's poetic profile, Cem Yavuz emphasizes the concepts of dramatic monologue and objective correlative and bases his translation approach on these concepts. The findings acquired from the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock reveal that paratextual elements such as religious, mythological, historical and technical notes are presented to enlighten the intertextual references, enhance reader engagement and awareness, and discover the authentic linguistic and emotional richness in the source. The examples extracted from the study show that the translator not only uses elegant language to sound poetic and natural, but also gives the paratextual elements a teaching role.

The Modern Man as Represented in Eliot’s the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

Alfred Prufrock's poetry incorporates modernist elements such as objective correlative, fragmentation, free verse, and irregular rhyme. It marks a marked split from romantic English poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. Eliot wants to explain the essence of life, and the content represents current day-to-day living rather than an escape from reality's grind. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" T.S. maintains Eliot's hold over today's man. The poem's narrator, c. Alfred Prufrock, represents Eliot's vision of modern man. Eliot explains his motivation for writing on this issue as follows: "Poetry may also help to destroy the traditional patterns of appreciation and evaluation that are constantly formed, and make people see the world anew, or a new phase of it." It can also remind us of the value of poetry on occasion. Deeper, unnamed sentiments that constitute the foundation of our existence are rarely explored since our entire life is a regular flight from ourselves, an escape from the visible and good world. The poem focuses on a difficulty caused by modern metropolitan culture. The objective of this thesis is to demonstrate how Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock portrays the modern man.

Body and Soul: Redefining Aging in T. S. Eliot’sand W. B. Yea

This paper aims to compare T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) and W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927) by focusing on aging. Theological/philosophical perspectives connecting aging to wisdom prevailed in the Middle Ages and pre-modern periods. However, beginning from the nineteenth century and prevailing in the twentieth, the changed perspective of equating aging to the body replaced the previous view. This study focuses on this shifted sociocultural attitude mirrored in Eliot’s poem. In “Sailing to Byzantium,“ Yeats, in his early 60s, feeling physical aging, first leaves for the ideal Byzantium, where there is no cycle of birth, growth, and death. He leaves the decaying body and pursues the world of the soul and artistic completion symbolized by Byzantium, but eventually realizes that neither art nor the soul can exist by itself. The poet concludes that humans must return to this mortal body, the grieving real world, accept all the pain, and lead the body and the soul together in real life.

Loss of identity in T.S. Eliot's poems selected poems

T. S. Eliot is often regarded as one of the best writers of the 20th century. The realities and pain of modern civilization after war are embodied in his creative works dealing with the aftermath of war and loss of identity, which earn him the Nobel prize in literature. There are several poems by this author that capture the experience of the contemporary man. There are three parts to this paper. The first part of this essay discusses the life and work of T. S. Eliot, the critical acclaim that his works have received, and the prestigious literary award that he has won. In the second part, we look at what makes contemporary poetry distinct. How T. S. Eliot enhances the characteristics that current poets employ to produce their poetry. The third section is a collection of Eliot's poems that reflect on and depict modern human life and the modern man's loss of identity, including "The Hollow Man," "The Waste Land," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," all of which were written after World War II. The poem "Prelude," which alludes to a musical overture to a contemporary day, is a perfect example. Eliot's poetry as a whole reflects the reality and sorrow of contemporary man's identity crisis. The study's conclusion summarizes its findings, which focused on how T.S. Eliot's poetry deals with themes of identity loss, the hardship of living, and solitude in the years after World War II.

Fearful and Hesitant Modern Men in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 1917

This paper is devoted to Eliot`s poetic critique of modern humanityin „The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‟ which is one of the significantpoems written by Eliot in 1911 because of its new modern style and thetechniques that the poet adopted from various sources. It concentrateson how Eliot criticises modern humanity for instance, anti-heroism,secularism, and alienation. In addition, the study will take into accountthe illumination on how the current society has over emphasized on theissue of Michelangelo. This is a remarkable presentation of howPrufrock views the modern people and modern life as a hell similar toDante's Inferno where man cannot express his feelings or doinganything to redeem himself.

T. S. 엘리엇의 「J. 알프레드 프루프록의 연가」와 셰익스피어의 『햄릿』: “자기와의 대화” 에 나타난 극적 독백

Prufrock compares himself to Hamlet, and then denies his importance for himself (“No! I am not a Prince, Hamlet”) and returns to his usual self-deprecation, announcing that he is not an important person through self-telling. In his own opinion, he would be a merely minor character in a play, not a protagonist, being faithful to his soliloquy. Prufrock and Hamlet inhabit a world in which something seems identical and time seems to be each common character. It seems they have the lifeless aspect of their dialogues with each monologue, developing the poetic drama. In other words, T. S. Eliot describes Prufrock’s speech as the drama like the poem and the poem like the drama. Each dialogue with the self relies on the reader’s imagination and decision to make decisions that are faithful to him, portraying the voice as a linguistic text in Hamlet of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Prufrock from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” two voices between ego and the split-ego which may be post-ego. The voice of self-telling expressed in these conversations is a dramatic monologue made of linguistic texts that form Hamlet’s self-image, and this is a conversation with himself that preserves tradition and individuality. In a nut shell, the monologue of self-telling is a more powerful image than anything else.

Of Wastelands and Ecopoetics: An Ecocritical Reading of T. S. Eliot’s Poetry.

This article is an ecocritical study of three of T. S. Eliot’s most notable works: “The Waste Land”, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and “The Hollow Men”. The poems are analyzed in detail and in relation with one another to highlight Eliot’s understanding of man’s relationship with nature through an elemental, ecomythical, and ecoreligious study. The article pursues a pattern in Eliot’s writing of a Man-Nature relationship as it focuses on the ways in which nature interacts with and influences man’s life, emotions, and faith.

Alfred Prufrock Suffered from Self-Awareness Disorder Which Led Him to Social Anxiety

This study sheds light on "J. Alfred Prufrock's Love Song" which is a poem that shows the disturbance of self-awareness of the narrator of the poems. The thoughts, senses, feelings, and emotions reflect a fifty-year-old man who experienced trauma due to the social situation and the crisis of the First World War. The aim of the study is to investigate the disturbance of self-awareness that the speaker suffers as a result of the societal situation in this era. The study concluded that "Prufrock" is a shy person with a hesitant nature and unable to take any positive or negative action in his life, and the disturbance in self-awareness led him to social anxiety which in turn led to despair, pessimism, isolation, and alienation. These aspects are among the principles of this modern period.

Düşük Benlik Saygısı ve Varoluşsal Umutsuzluk T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock'un Aşk Şarkısı 1919

It is highly believed that modernism brought about various positive aspects to people’s life. However, it should be noted that it has, as well, a number of shortcomings as it caused tremendous change to the deep structure of the society and individuals’ perception of the world. The present work aims to spot light on the issue of social anxiety; its causes and effects on the modern individual through the analysis of T.S Eliot’s poem The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The poem exhibits sense of loneliness, worthlessness and meaningless of modern life that results in low-self-esteem and existential despair to individuals. The work adopts Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a humanistic theory in addition to the existentialist theory to analyse Prufrock’s social despair, low self-esteem, and ineffectiveness. The poem shows that people’s unsatisfactory need to security, love, acceptance and sense of belonging may have destructive effects on people’s self-esteem, sense of existence and worthiness of life.

Intertextuality in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Intertextuality in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Jagger, Jasmine. Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith

At the heart of this book are a very alert, informed listening to the music of poetry and a focus on how it communicates and contains emotion. Attentive to various kinds of worry and intense anxiety – Edward Lear’s ‘morbids’, T. S. Eliot’s ‘nerves’ and Stevie Smith’s ‘scratches’ – Jasmine Jagger examines how each of these three poets draws on imagery and acoustic devices that might appear ridiculous, but in fact serve to communicate emotional disturbance beyond the bounds of what is considered ‘normal’. In particular, Jagger shows that an edgy interplay between the often unsettling rhythms of speech and the measured predictability of metre allows poets to hear and feel in their work emotions that they are impelled to communicate, and lets readers hear and feel these too. This is an unusually writerly book, and, in its nuanced sense of verse, an outstanding study. While not engaging with the work of Rita Felski and a number of other American-influenced writers on ‘affect’, Jagger takes some of her theoretical bearings from Isobel Armstrong, Derek Attridge, Christopher Ricks, Ann Stillman and other (mainly British) critics alert to the fusion of emotion and word-music. Jagger is not afraid to draw on biographical, anthropological and psychological material as she articulates her close readings and close listenings to poems as apparently different as ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Not Waving But Drowning’. Without in any way reducing her chosen poets to one template, she shows how, by exploring ‘individual tendernesses as dramatized by poetic rhythm’, these poets demonstrate the ways in which ‘poetic composition can also indicate an attempt to translate affect into a bodily state. In so doing, affective poetics becomes a way for poets to plumb their own depths, reconnecting with, and becoming tender to, their emotional complexity’ (p. 202).

Satire in Modernism: A Comparative Study of T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow

Satire in Modernism: A Comparative Study of T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

A Stylistic Analysis of T. S. Eliot's ''The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock''

This research aims to analyze T.S. Eliot 's ''The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock'' from a stylistic perspective that distinguishes each writer's work from others. Writers construct their words together uniquely according to different aspects like meaning and structure. The role of stylistic analysis is to disclose these aspects in the literary work and enjoy the concept of beauty in the poem. The study tackles: phonological, graphological, morphological and lexico-syntactic as syntactic level. All these levels participate in showing the figurative and literal meaning that are used by the poet. The poem tells a story of middle -aged man who is suffered a lot because he is torn between telling his love or not. He makes many attempts, but his spiritual cowardice and hesitation prevent his love song from being sung. The poet goes further to address the dilemma of modern man who is suppressed and coward by community.

Annus Mirabilis: 1922 год в истории модернизма

On December 8, 2022, an international academic conference dedicated to the year 1922 as an important milestone in the history of American and European Modernism was held at the Russian State University of Humanities (Moscow). The conference aimed at the cultural reconstruction of 1922 and was organized by the Department of Comparative-Historical Literary Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities, and A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. American literary history occupied a prominent place in the program of the conference. The plenary session was devoted to T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land was published in 1922. Olga Polovinkina (Russian State University for the Humanities, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences) spoke about the importance of the aesthetics of the music hall for the strcture The Waste Land. Igor Shaitanov (Russian State University of Humanities, The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) drew a parallel between The Waste Land and Evegny Zamyatin's Alatyr’. Vassily Tolmatchoff (Lomonosov Moscow State University) suggested a new interpretation of the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. A.A. Astvatsaturov (St. Petersburg State University) considered T.S. Eliot’s modernist work in comparison with the creative attitudes and self-fashioning of Henry Miller. Alexandra Zinovieva (Lomonosov Moscow State University) spoke about Countess Marie Louise Elisabeth Larisсh von Moennich, the heroine of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and her participation in German and Austrian cinematographic projects of the late 1910s — early 1920s. Olga Panova (A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Lomonosov Moscow State University) reconstructed the year 1922 in the history of the Harlem Renaissance. Irina Morozova (Russian State University of Humanities) presented the year 1922 as an important period in the history of American pharaohmania. Olga Antsyferova (St. Petersburg State University) analysed the book 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics (ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté; Cambridge University Press, 2015) showing how the methodology of historical simultaneity works on the material of culture studies.

Маска и душа: шекспировские образы в поэзии Элиота

Poetic and dramatic works by T.S. Eliot include numerous allusions to Shakespeare's plays, different collisions based on Shakespearean plots, theatrical techniques and settings of the great playwright, etc. This paper considers the ways and instruments of transforming and representing Shakespearean images in Eliot’s poetic texts, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, The Waste Land, “Marina”, “Coriolan”, etc. The important aspect of Eliot's reception is the appeal to Shakespeare’s heroes (Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Pericles, etc.) as archetypes for creating his own poetic characters. The researcher identifies two main ways of transforming and representing Shakespearean images: masks and dramatic monologues (“dramatis personæ”). The characters in Eliot’s poems use Shakespearean masks as a means of self-identification (Prufrock), they are components of “compound” images (“a cubist woman” in The Waste Land). The dramatic monologues of Eliot’s protagonists are pronounced on behalf of Shakespearen heroes (Pericles, Coriolan). Shakespearean allusions in Eliot’s poetry are to expand the boundaries of the text, deepen the characters, include them into a certain cultural paradigm, etc. The analysis of Shakespearean images in Eliot's poetry allows us to understand the peculiarity of perception for Shakespeare and methods of poetic mastering of his heritage in Modernist culture.

Working Title

Working Title

프루프록의 ‘위대한’ 고백: 단테 『신곡』과 엘리엇의 「J. 알프레드 프루프록의 연가」 같이 읽기

Critical readings of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” tend to conceive of Prufrock’s recurring evasion and frustration as deriving from his inability to confess his love, a symptom of the ills of modern civilization. However, this paper reconsiders this prevalent interpretation by intensively examining Dante’s lines from Inferno, which Eliot imports into the epigraph of this poem. Dante’s influence on Eliot have been widely explored already, but most studies investigate only the intertextuality between Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno, especially Guido’s responses to Dante’s question, with the Prufrock poem. However, this paper pays special attention to Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno and of Purgatory to show that Canto 27 is the site where Dante comments on human reason. Based on this observation, I argue that Eliot’s poem, by endorsing Dante’s lines, extends Eliot’s criticism of human reason as well. In particular, I understand Eliot’s “individual talent” to be his innovative shift in voice when Prufrock directly addresses the readers as he instantly combines his split self as “we”. This moment of integration overlaps with Dante’s double identification with Guido and with Virgil, transposing Prufrock’s ‘monologue’ within his divided self to an ‘aside’ revealed to the readers. Although the speaker fails his ‘love confession’ per se, we can reassess it to be a ‘great’ confession when Prufrock delivers his shameful story of hesitation directly to the readers in the voice of “we”—where the speaker momentarily oversteps the solid confinement of his excessive self-consciousness.