Eliot

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Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• ENGL 203
• Dr. Fike

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Quiz Today

• Please clear your desks.

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Eliot and Imagism

• Modernism involves imagism, and this in turn
  involves a variety of things
• Getting rid of the WWian I
• Creating clear, objective images to which readers
  respond emotionally (cf. Eliots objective
  correlative below)
• Variations in poetic formpoetry no longer has to
  have standard rhythm and rhyme free verse

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Summary

• Modern poetry must address the modern world with
  modern language and images appropriate to the
  modern experience, unfettered by the conventions
  which had grown up over the centuries.
• Source http//www.mala.bc.ca/mcneil/m4lec13a.ht
  m

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Example of an Imagist Poem

• In a Station of the Metro
• The apparition of these faces in the crowd
• Petals on a wet, black bough.
• Ezra Pound

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Prufrock and Periodicity

• Eliots poem illustrates Imagism.
• It also reflects the fragmentation resulting from
  World War I (1914-18) parallel to suppression
  of the links in the chain, the technique he
  uses in The Wasteland.

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Mini-Quiz

• Which one of the following does not fit?
• Casanova
• Romeo
• Don Juan
• Sirano de Bergerac
• J. Alfred Prufrock

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Answer

• E J. Alfred Prufrock
• But, more importantly, how did you know that?

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Answer

• You know love songs because you listen to them
  every day.
• You know the names of great lovers because you
  are familiar with Western tradition.
• And you know enough love songs in Western
  tradition to know that J. Alfred Prufrocka prude
  in a frockdoes not fit with the other figures.

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Point

• To be a good reader of Prufrock, you have to
  know something about western tradition. This is
  very similar to what Eliot says about western
  tradition in his essay, Tradition and the
  Individual Talent.

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Page 2014/506

• The par. begins, Yet if the only form of
  tradition.
• What is Eliots point in this par.?

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Answer

• History and tradition are not static artifacts
  that exist only in the past they are also
  present in our reading of them and in the use to
  which we put them.
• --Dr. Fike

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Goals for Todays Class

1. To examine literary tradition in connection with
   Prufrock.
2. To do a really close reading of the first stanza.
3. And to talk about Prufrocks problems and about
   how he ends up.

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Section I Literary Tradition and Prufrock

• What happens in this poem?
• In the literal sense, what does Prufrock DO?

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Answer

• He goes to a party, hoping to ask someone to
  marry him, but he lacks the courage to get the
  question out.
• This action (one might say inaction) is based
  on a story by Henry James called Crapy
  Cornelia the main character in that story
  hopes and intends to ask a woman to marry him,
  but because of ambivalence, does not do so.

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From Crapy Cornelia

• It was as if he had sat and watched himselfthat
  came back to him Shall I now or shant I? Will
  I now or wont I? Say within the next three
  minutes, say by a quarter past six, or by twenty
  minutes past, at the furthestalways if nothing
  more comes up to prevent.

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Points

• Here are the same agony of indecision and the
  same lack of conviction that P expresses.
• The action of the poemits literal senseis
  borrowed from literary tradition.
• The ambivalence of Jamess character also informs
  Prufrock, who says, Do I dare / Disturb the
  universe?

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Other Allusions?

• What other allusions did you notice in the poem?
• Take some time with a partner to search for
  allusions to other authors and literary works.

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Allusions in Prufrock

• Love songs/great lovers
• Henry James, Crapy Cornelia
• Dantes Inferno
• Michelangelo
• Ecclesiastes 31-8
• Hesiods Works and Days
• Shakespeares Twelfth Night
• Shakespeares Hamlet

• Mark 6 Matthew 14 re. John the Baptist
• Marvells To His Coy Mistress
• John 11 re. Lazarus
• Chaucers General Prologue and Clerks Tale
• Fools in Elizabethan drama
• Donnes Go and Catch a Falling Star

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The Key Allusions

• Dante and Lazarus
• Michelangelo
• Hamlet

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Dante and Lazarus

• If I thought that my answer were being made to
  someone who would ever return to earth, this
  flame would remain without further movement but
  since no one has ever returned alive from this
  depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you
  without fear of infamy.
• Source Guido de Montefeltro, speaking in
  Dantes Inferno, Canto 27
• Why is this an appropriate epigraph?
• What connection can you make between Guido and
  Lazarus (line 94)?

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Answer

• Prufrock is like Guido He thinks that he is
  damned and that he is talking to someone who is
  also damned.
• Lazarus, whom Jesus raises from the dead, gets a
  second chance.
• The implication is that there will be no such
  second chance for Prufrock like Guido, he will
  stay in hell.

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Michelangelo (1475-1564)

• What do you know about Michelangelo?

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Factoids

• Michelangelo was a Renaissance man painter,
  sculptor, poet, architect.
• A. L. Rowse describes him as all too virile and
  obvious, a powerful and stunning personality who
  imposed his extrovert brute force upon all
  around him (vs. Prufrocks timidity).
• His most famous sculpture was David, the prime
  statement of the Renaissance ideal of perfect
  humanity (Britannica) vs. Prufrocks appearance.
• http//vlsi.colorado.edu/rbloem/david.html
  contains male frontal nudity
• Prufrock See lines 40, 44, 82, and 120-21.

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More on David

• Rowse 17 Actually, there is an ambivalence in
  the conception of this marvelous work, the kind
  of duality within one mind from which it springs.
  For Michelangelo it was an idealization of
  himself, the kind of self he would have liked to
  be but also it was a projection, conscious or
  unconscious, of his own desires. There is no
  sexual response to women in the whole of
  Michelangelos work, any more than there is in
  Leonardos. And yet, all art is intimately
  connected with the sexual urge. Here in
  David is Michelangelos type sexual appeal
  stands revealed in the whole stance, in every
  limb and curve and muscle, perhaps especially in
  the large strong hands.

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Points in the Rowse Quotation

• Michelangelo was a homosexual.
• David represents two things
• An expression of Michelangelos ideal self-image
• A projection of his own desires
• Source A. L. Rowse, Homosexuality in History
  A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and
  the Arts

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Question

• What does any of this have to do with Prufrock?

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Possible Answers

• Prufrock does not feel secure because he does not
  look manly.
• His sexuality may be ambivalent the womens
  talk of Michelangelo may cut too close to Ps
  hidden desires perhaps their remarks activate
  his sexual ambivalence.
• Therefore, for these two reasons, he does not ask
  his question.

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Hamlet

• Lines 111ff. Prufrock thinks that he is like
  Polonius, not Hamlet.
• He thinks that Hamlet is capable of action, and
  this is a good example of how an author differs
  from the character whom he creates.
• Hamlets greatest problem is uncertainty leading
  to inaction, and Eliot knew this (next slide).

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Eliot on Hamlet

• Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion
  which is inexpressiblean emotion which can find
  no outlet in action (my emphasis).
• POINT If Prufrock admires Hamlet as a man of
  action, and if Hamlet is (for most of the play)
  certainly NOT such a man, then Prufrock himself
  must be really paralyzed.

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Ulysses, Order, and Myth

• Eliots point in this essay is that juxtaposing a
  modern character with someone famous from
  literary tradition is a perfect way to undermine
  that modern character.
• This mythical method is partly what Eliot is up
  to in the references to Michelangelo and Hamlet
  they illuminate and undermine Prufrock.

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Form Dramatic Monologue

• The poems form is also related to literary
  tradition.
• Dramatic monologue Prufrock is the foremost
  modern example of this form.
• Characteristics
• The speaker is caught at a moment of great
  stress.
• Most of the utterance is gratuitous the business
  is over in line 86 And in short, I was
  afraid.
• Prufrock reveals himself unawares (as does
  Guido).
• We know something about the listener only by
  hearing what the speaker says (like one end of a
  phone conversation).

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More on Tradition

• In all of the ways above, Eliot uses literary
  tradition.
• But the poem, in turn, becomes PART of that
  tradition, and later works allude to it.
• I can heard the mermaids singing, each to each
• John Donne, Go and Catch a Falling Star
  Teach me to hear mermaids singing
• Ive Heard the Mermaids Singing a film about a
  Prufrock-like woman who manages to make the
  transition that he cannot http//www.imdb.com/ti
  tle/tt0093239/
• Blown Away I should have been a pair of ragged
  claws (line 73).
• Apocalypse Now? See The Hollow Men (491) and
  http//youtube.com/watch?v845Hx3XV9EU.

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POINT

• The poem is a hinge between tradition and popular
  culture.
• Thus the poem takes its place in the tradition to
  which Eliot refers.
• Any literary work can be a Janus figure in the
  same way.

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Section II Group Work on the Opening Stanza

1. To whom is P referring when he says you and I?
2. What kind of associations do you have with a
   patient etherised upon a table?
3. What is P doing here?
4. What is Ps problem here?
5. How is this a love song gone wrong?
6. How does the poetry act out its meaning?

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Possible Answers

• First 2 lines
• Typical of a love song
• you and I the you may be some other person,
  the reader, or an aspect of P himself (he is,
  after all, a psyche divided against itself)
• a patient etherised upon a table something is
  really wrong lots of negative associations.
• There are breaks in the rhyme at lines 3 and 10
  table and question do not rhyme with anything
  else. This discordant technique signals
  something important.

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Energy

• The direction of sexual energy is downward both
  spatially and socially
• Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.
• The direction of the party is upward Prufrock
  will descend the stair (line 39) when he
  leaves.
• The yellow fog in line 15 fog is linked to
  sexual desire in The Wasteland.
• Lines 15ff. echo Crapy Cornelia Well, I am
  a cat! Cornelia grinned.

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Analogy

• The Boston Evening Transcript
• THE READERS of the Boston Evening Transcript
• Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn. 
• When evening quickens faintly in the street,
• Wakening the appetites of life in some
• And to others bringing the Boston Evening
  Transcript,        
• I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
• Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to
  Rochefoucauld,
• If the street were time and he at the end of the
  street,
• And I say, Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston
  Evening Transcript.

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Section III Prufrocks Problem and How He Ends
Up

• A conflict between energy and restraint.
• The poem presents images of these two things.
• With a partner, identify as many of them as you
  can.

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Energy vs. Restraint

• Energy
• Sexual energy (fog)
• 28 murder
• 46 Disturb the universe
• 82 my headbrought in upon a platter (thought
  vs. feeling what Eliot calls a dissociation of
  sensibility in The Metaphysical Poets the
  essay appears in your book see the 6th page for
  the term)
• Polonius gets stabbed by Hamlet

• Restraint
• 57-58 sprawling on a pinwriggling on a wall
• 73 pair of ragged claws (i.e., pure
  sensationno reason)
• 105 a magic lantern threw the nerves in
  patterns on a screen

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Objective Correlative

• The only way of expressing emotion in the form
  of art is by finding an objective correlative
  in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
  chain of events which shall be the formula of the
  particular emotion such that when the external
  facts, which must terminate in sensory
  experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
  evoked (Eliot, Hamlet).

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O.C. and Analogy to Songs

• A pair of lovers has a favorite song.
• You associate specific songs with specific places
  and persons.
• Songs function as the auditory equivalent of the
  objective correlative.

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More on O.C.

• An individual image can be an objective
  correlative e.g., a bug wriggling on a pin
  suggests extreme discomfort.
• But Prufrock himself has become an objective
  correlative.
• Hes a Prufrock, one might say, and the
  listener would get the meaning some guy is the
  balding, middle-aged mayor of Nowheresville.

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More on Energy vs. Restraint

• Which wins?
• Lines 122-end.

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Possible Answers

• Drowning suggests that restraint wins.
• Drowning is what mermaids do to sailors.
• But Prufrocks mermaids do not sing to himthey
  sing each to each.
• The human voices wake him, and THEN he
  drownsboth parts of him evidentlyin the
  conscious awareness of his own failure to act.
• POINT He is utterly overcome by a social
  situation and by his own lack of self-esteem.

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A Final Element of Tradition

• The concluding tercets parallel terza rima, the
  rhyme scheme of the Divine Comedy interlinked
  tercets in which the second line of each tercet
  rhymes with the first and third lines of the
  next aba bcb cdc etc.
• Eliots tercets are NOT terza rima, but they do
  call Dantes verse form to mind.
• Therefore, there is a slight sense that Eliot is
  framing the poem with Dante. The implication is
  that Prufrock, who is in hell at the beginning
  (as we know because of the epigraph), is still in
  it. He has done nothing to improve his
  situation.
• END