T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: Prufrock an Indecisive Man

Abstract

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1968) an American of a New England family was educated at Harvard, Paris and oxford. The collected addition of his poems contains Prufrock and other observations (1917). Poems (1920), the waste land (1922), Hollow men (1925), Ash Wednesday fragmentary (1930) Ariel Poems (1927-30) Choruses from ‘The Rock’ (1934), Four quartets (1935-42), Eliot, a conscious and deliberate classicist, believed that poetry should be impersonal. The poet’s personal experience is no doubt there but it is personal experience that has incorporated the experience of the age. The cast of the most of poems is dramatic. The paper deals with the Eliot’s masterpiece ‘the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ published in poetry magazine (1915). The poet uses the technique of ‘interior monologue’ to lay bare the mental landscape of a sick mind Prufrock. In this way Eliot highlights the neurotic nature of Prufrock. What passes within the consciousness of the persona in the substance of the poem. Prufrock is a moral coward. He does not have the courage to propose to his beloved. He is always postponing the movement of action to some future time. Prufrock is actually self conscious of his advancing age, his baldness and his thin body. Prufrock hesitated and fails to come to a conclusion. He thinks that his proposal to the lady will be like disturbing the whole universe. Prufrock becomes the symbol of the moral decay of the contemporary western civilization