5.2: T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born into a large, upper-middle-class family in St. Louis, Missouri. His early interest in literature was fostered by his education, beginning at Smith Academy, where he studied classical and modern languages; followed by a prep year at Milton Academy; and concluding in America when he attended Harvard University. There he completed work for a Ph. D. in Philosophy, but failed to earn the degree because he did not complete the final oral exam.

He expanded his knowledge of philosophy by studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, where he attended lectures by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and at Merton College, Oxford University. From Oxford, Eliot frequently traveled to London where he met Ezra Pound, an Imagist poet and major figure in the Modernist movement in literature.

Determined to remain in England, Eliot earned a living as a teacher, as an accountant at Lloyd’s Bank, and as an editor at Faber and Faber publishers. In 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism—professing as an Anglo-Catholic—and became a British citizen. His poetry expressed a parallel search for stability and personal, spiritual, and cultural meaning and coherence. As a modernist, his experiments in form, sound, and imagery used fragmentation and multi-vocalism along with the mythic method that gave shape to apparent chaos and spiritual meaning to apparent vacuity.

In his poetry, Eliot often counterpointed the distant past with the present to highlight inner vacuity, or the modern individual’s tendency to be cut off from the unconscious and alienated from nature and the natural cycle. In the “Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), he depicted the individual self as tenuous, changing and discontinuous, without integrity, unity, or freedom and subject to external conditions. Like Conrad, Eliot sought to put such almost inexpressible horrors into words, relying on objective correlatives that use externals/symbols to express emotion and thought.

His most famous poem The Waste Land (1922) grounds its grail-like quest for meaning and renewal in the syncretic research of Sir James Fraser’s The Golden Bough (1890), a study in comparative religion that searched for the one myth to which all myths referred. The Waste Land seeks for archetypal/socio-cultural identities beyond the egoistic self and the immediate historical moment. His later poems, particularly Four Quartets (1943), locate the intersection of the immediate moment and eternity, movement and stasis, spirituality and art.

Eliot influenced literature and culture through not only his poetry but also such important critical essays as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1921) and “Hamlet and his Problems” (1921). His work led to the revival of the metaphysical poets, especially John Donne (1572-1631), and influenced younger critics and poets such as Woolf, William Empson (1906-1984) and W. H. Auden (1907-1973). Eliot won many awards and recognitions, including the Nobel Prize in Literature and an Order of Merit.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,

Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question. . . .

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

****

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

****

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

****

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Contributors and Attributions

Adapted from British Literature II - Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond by Robinson. Sourced from LibreTexts , license: CC BY-SA