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Eliot, Imagism, and Prufrock
“The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”
Eliot’s Influence
• It is almost impossible to overestimate
T.S. Eliot’s effect on our understanding of
how we read and write poetry
• Eliot is being deliberately experimental
• NOTE: many of you probably find the
poetic style in “Prufrock” odd and difficult
to grasp, especially in comparison to
poems you have read earlier.
Modern Art
Three Tenets of Imagism
1.
2.
3.
The poet must get rid of the omnipresent voice of the poet, the
Wordsworthian “I.” Whatever poetry is, it must rid itself of
wallowing in subjective emotionalism.
Whatever the poet has to communicate, he or she must do so in
terms of objective images: clear, objective, precise, concentrated,
and fresh symbols that capture, in the way they are presented, the
emotional qualities under exploration
Imagist poetry demands a break with the old conventions of
writing verse, especially with the standard rhythm and rhyme.
Imagism promoted what came to be known as “free verse”
Images that Illuminate Prufrock
Q: What is the logical connection between
the fog, the women who come and go
talking of Michelangelo, a crustacean,
coffee, Lazarus, Hamlet, John the Baptist,
and the Sirens?
A: They are all expressions of and therefore
images illuminating Prufrock himself –
glimpses into his emotional state
Eliot’s Irony
What gives Eliot’s style an urbanity and
resonance is his constant use of a certain form
of irony, a style known as Romantic irony, or
what might be called, the irony of instant
deflation.
Eliot will use Romantic irony within a single line,
where the growing energy of what looks like the
start of a confident or at least important
statement will be denied by the end of the line:
“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”
Canto XXVII
Evil Counselors
Why choose these lines as an epigraph?