"THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK" AS TEENAGED WASTELAND
As A thesis submitted to the faculty of 3G San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of 2 - 01$ ’ the requirements for the Degree *-3^3
Master of Arts
In
English Literature
by
Margaret Sarah Snyder
San Francisco, California
May 2015 Copyright by Margaret Sarah Snyder 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as Teenaged Wasteland by Margaret Sarah Snyder, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree
Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.
Sara Hackenberg, Associate Professor "THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK" AS TEENAGED WASTELAND
Margaret Sarah Snyder
San Francisco, California
2015
Though the large body of criticism on T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reads the titular narrator as a middle-aged man, I would like to join the critical discourse to offer an alternate reading: that Prufrock is a teenager. I argue that Prufrock as a teenaged persona provides Eliot with a decidedly modern mechanism for an all- encompassing sensibility and strikes much greater consonance with both Eliot’s criticism and poetics, as well as, explicating the continued presence of the poem in the high school English classroom. I will outline Eliot’s early poetic development, focusing on adaptation of Matthew Arnold’s Victorian Romantacism to the Modern world and his indoctrination in the work of the French Symbolists Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire, who taught Eliot that, “the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry” (To Criticize the Critic, 126). With “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot therefore develops a narrative for teenaged experience that became a blueprint for young adult male experience; the afterlife of Eliot’s poem, which I will explore in British and American rock, forms another key piece of its continued ability to still relate to the world over one hundred years after its initial composition and publication.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.
Date PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to take a brief opportunity to express my endless gratitude to Professor Sara
Hackenberg for both her engaging teaching and creative coursework at San Francisco
State University and her generous guidance and encouragement with this thesis project. I will remain forever indebted to her challenging intellect and passion for her subject matter. I would also like to thank Professor Meg Schoerke for all of her patience and her insightful course on metaphors. Finally, I would like to thank Jan Lamborn and other members of the Graduate Studies Department and College of Extended Learning who made the completion of this project possible. I could not have completed this paper without the invaluable assistance of the Faculty and Staff of San Francisco State and the experience has been arduous and rewarding. I will be proud to display my San Francisco
State diploma and will always remember the support and kindness of those who helped me make a dream come true despite all the challenges and delays. Thank you.
5 TABLE OF CONTENTS
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as Teenaged Wasteland...... 1
I. Introductory Remarks...... 1
II. Eliot’s Studies in Poetics and Consciousness...... 7
III. Prufrock the Teenager...... 23
IV. Eliot as Victorian Child Coming of Age...... 35
V. The Song of Powerless Prufrock...... 60
VI. Publication and Reception: Contextual Atmosphere...... 78
VII. Prufrock’s Afterlife as a Blueprint for Teenage Failure...... 86
Works Cited...... 95
6 1
“THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” AS TEENAGED WASTELAND
I. Introductory Remarks
“Don’t cry Don’t raise your eyes It’s only teenaged wasteland” (The Who).
The large body of criticism on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”1 focuses on Prufrock as the character of the modern man. Roger Mitchell provides one such reading:
J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot's poems. He is the Representative
Man of early Modernism.” Mitchell continues to summarize this pervasive interpretation,
elaborating this Man as “shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded (many have said
impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of solipsism (42).
While such readings provide a specific access point to the poem, in this thesis I will join the critical conversation to develop an alternative perspective on the narrative persona of Prufrock. In this paper I will argue that Prufrock is not, in fact, a middle-aged man, but rather a teenager overwhelmed with the horrific apprehension of how he will grow old in a world in which he is not sure he belongs.
The reason I think it is significant to assert this reading is two-fold. First, reading Prufrock as a teenager finds much more consonance with Eliot’s own critical writings and poetic development. Second, with “Prufrock,” Eliot develops a template for speaking to urban, adolescent male experience that has since been replicated through time as a powerful cultural tool for registering the angst, frustration and ennui considered endemic of modern experience. The afterlife of “Prufrock” exists on the one level through
1 To clarify, I will refer to Eliot’s poem as “Prufrock” and the poem’s narrator as Prufrock throughout the remainder of this paper. 2
continued presence in literary studies, as discussed by educator Derek Soles in his article on teaching
“Prufrock” to high school students. As Soles notes, the poem “often appears in literature anthologies designed for use in high school and college English classes,” which has contributed over time to its status as a “modern classic” (59). On another level, the poem still makes sense to present day readers due to their familiarity, even if on a subconscious level, with the continuous reincarnation of the “Prufrock” blueprint in expressions of teenaged, male experience. As Eliot’s poem is itself a love song, I want to look to British and American music, especially rock music, to illustrate this blueprint phenomenon. Ultimately, my reading provides powerful insights into Eliot’s writing process, his poetic development, and the poem’s continuing afterlife.
The underlying question inciting this paper was my own personal response to the poem. For, why did "Prufrock” resonate with me as a high school student, if it were simply the ramblings of an apprehensive middle-aged man? When I first read “Prufrock” as a fourteen year-old, I recall being struck by the directness of Prufrock’s voice, as if he were talking to me; in addition, unlike previous poems I had read, I knew how the narrator felt, especially the part about the eyes pinning you to the wall or wanting to just be crab legs. I thought Prufrock understood my high school anxieties, social unease and the sensation of wasting time, and it did not occur at all to me that he might be a middle-aged man. Since as a teenager, my original interaction with the poem was one of alignment and connection to the narrative voice, the assumption of Prufrock as middle-aged never quite sat right with me. In his essay on teaching “Prufrock” to high school students, Soles notes, “in some ways it is a strange choice for inclusion in young adult curriculum since it concerns the insecurities of a middle-aged man” (59). Soles does not take this observation further than thinking it odd. I think because “Prufrock” speaks to young adult experience that is exactly why it is so often taught in high school curriculum. 3
In all my research, I encountered only one reading that vaguely hinted at the narrator of “Prufrock” being a young adult. In a minor aside during critic Jackson J. Benson’s discussion of Quentin Compson as a self-portrait of a young William Faulkner, Benson mentions that “such contemporaries as Joyce, Pound,
Eliot, and Hemingway.... produced protagonists with whom they identified, yet viewed with a certain ironic detachment — self caricatures, as it were — but the young protagonist with all his faults is portrayed as less guilty in each case than the culture which surrounds him” (145). While this statement does not identify the Eliotic protagonist as Prufrock, previously Benson finds Faulkner’s self-portrait Quentin to be
“reminiscent” of Prufrock, as the names of both narrators suggest “a certain self-mockery by the author”
(145). While this indirect connection offers a promising glimpse at a potential interpretation in support of my argument, Benson’s discussion of Faulkner’s self-portrait veers into the category of a blatantly biographical reading hinged disappointingly on a collapse of author and narrator.
Attempting to delve into the psychological state or the personality of Eliot in any productive way is like trying to solve a one hundred year old crime with no physical evidence except some letters and essays. What we do find in Eliot’s letters and essays is a poet and a critic obsessed with developing a distinct poetics. This is what I will attune my research to. I will not seek to find Eliot the person, but instead seek out Eliot the poet to unravel how he is telling a story and what this story might be. By focusing on the narrator as a persona, as a performance of a particular type of engagement with the world, we can think of
Eliot as operating on an authorial level, willfully constructing a narrative persona and the drama surrounding him. As Eliot reiterates, “the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium”
(“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 42). Thus, I do not read Prufrock as a teenager out of biographical speculation that he might be a thinly veiled self-portrait of Eliot, but rather, I offer that we approach
Prufrock the persona as a teenager, as a poetic mechanism to capable of consuming all experience and mediating meaning to the reader. 4
In order to substantiate an interpretation of Prufrock as a teenager, I will identify important elements of larger cultural context and Eliot’s own early poetic development and later critical writings that give credence to this reading. By utilizing the John Savage’s research in The Prehistory of the American
Youth Culture: 1875-1945, 1 will cover the specific demographic shifts from Eliot’s birth in 1888, until the poem’s publication in 1917, that led to a rising subculture of urban American and European teenagers. With this sense of cultural movement in mind, I will chart Eliot’s development of a poetic voice in his young adult years. Eliot’s discovery of the late nineteenth-century “dramatically young and urban poets,” Charles
Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue, catalyze Eliot’s development of a specific voice (Hannoosh, 345). Another important aspect of Eliot’s early poetic metamorphosis can best be observed through a comparison between
Eliot’s work with that of Victorian poet Matthew Arnold; I will show how Eliot remains in conversation with his contemporaneous poetic heritage of the Victorians and Romantics and he engages mainstream poetic trends in order to register his difference and develop something new.
Looking at the publication and the reception of "Prufrock" provides an invaluable lens into the way readers initially approached Eliot as a young rebel and a further reason why I read the poem as about the experiences of a teenager. As Eliot writes,
From Baudelaire I learned first, a precedent for the political possibilities, never developed
in any poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern
metropolis, of the possibility of the fusion between the sordidly realist and the
phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic.
From him, as Laforgue, I learned that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience
that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for
poetry; and that the source of new poetry might be found in what had been regarded 5
hitherto as the impossible, the sterile, the intractably unpoetic into poetry {To Criticize
the Critic, 126).
While writing “Prufrock” in 1910, Eliot is exploring this concept that the material for “new poetry” lies in
“the impossible...the intractably unpoetic;” and by tracing the contours of adolescent modern experience through his persona of Prufrock he develops a narrative that still translates today as a pattern for teenaged expression (126).
I follow critic Peter Nicholls to emphasize the poetics of Modernism. This means thinking of
Modern poetry the same way definitive Modernist writers and critics, such as Ezra Pound and Eliot did, in the terms of poetics as “the event of making” (54). This poetic event of setting words in motion to perform and dramatize the making of meaning through unexpected combinations forming at the “hazy borderline” of consciousness forms the theoretical backbone of Eliot’s modern poetics (54). Ultimately, for Eliot to be modernizing is to be evolving, to be aligning one’s poetics with the complexity of modernizing culture through providing a cultural narrative that can contain both continuity and change; as Nicholls points out, for Eliot this “otherness that shadows poetic expression is at once the force of the new ...and the voice of tradition” (55). Eliot develops the tradition of teenaged expression he finds so compelling in the works of the French Symbolists with the established poetic techniques of the Metaphysical poets, such as juxtaposition and objective correlative, into a praxis of form and content: Prufrock, the modern teenaged persona as a mechanism for all-encompassing sensibility.
Defining and chronologically delineating Modernity is a nearly impossible task. In regards to poetry, it is usually understood as an epoch marked as roughly starting in the early 1910s, when Eliot writes
"Prufrock" (Blair, 885). Modernity is a highly contested space and in this paper I utilize the work of
Timothy Mitchell in order to read Modernity as a particular idea of time performed upon the stage of history, built upon “the assumption of shared spatio-temporal experience;” for, the borders of eras emerge 6
not sharply but slowly through an increasing understanding of shared experience or sensibility (15).
Significantly, the word “modern” as an adjective describes “being in existence at this time; current, present,” which indicates that to be modern definitively means being in conversation or connection with the present
{Oxford English Dictionary). Thus to be modern is to engage with the present. This engagement involves a collective cultural agreement on what that present might be. Mitchell characterizes Modern sensibility as
“shaped by this investment in representation of self as the most authentic glimpse into the experience of observing the actual world" and further argues that for Modern consciousness "a disembodied observer is the natural state of engagement in the world” (20). "Prufrock" speaks to these investments and performances of self, which I characterize as fugitive identity; that is to say, conceiving of our own identity as performing an escape from ourselves, or hiding from our self, through these notions of disembodied observation and socially-constructed self.
World War I also plays a significant role in shaping masculine experience and cultural perception of gender identity during the poem's publication in the late 1910s. As Anthony Fletcher's research on the
impact of the War on cultural concepts of masculinity suggests, emergent trends of the male as patient, and apprehension of wasted youth and overall cultural uncertainty resonate with Prufrock's modern teenaged wasteland. As Baudelaire conceives it, "Modernity is transient, the fleeting, the contingent, it is one half art, the other half being the eternal and immovable” ("The Painter of Modern Life"). Thus, teenage identity as a cultural concept is contingent upon Modernity. Since the teenager represents a transient temporal space between youth and adulthood, the teenager therefore emerges as the most Modern of subject matters and speaking voices. Eliot develops the French Symbolist precursor of speaking to teenaged urban experience and connects directly to the present through elevating this voice into an all-encompassing modern sensibility.
Another way of approaching this concept is through Eliot’s discussion in his essay “Music of
Poetry”; for Eliot, “poetry has to be in such a relation to the speech of the time that the listener or reader can 7
say ‘that is how I should talk if I could talk in poetry’” (23-24). Eliot continues, explicating that the reason why “the best contemporary poetry” can be exciting and fulfilling lies in commonality with contemporary speech and music, and drawing the reader into conversation with the verse (24). Thus, “Prufrock” is modern not just in choice of persona, but also in the style of diction and the lilt of the verse, Prufrock speaks to the reader in the common language of the time, inviting the reader to connect with his emerging Modern experience. Thus, the adolescent identity of the narrator and Eliot's narrative style of connecting to the common speech and music of current surroundings, provide the direction for my study of the poem’s afterlife.
Just as “Prufrock” attests to be a song, the afterlife of the poem as narrative pattern can be vividly observed in British and American rock songs that speak to teenaged male experience in the modern world.
We will see that “Prufrock” is less of an artifact of a by-gone epoch, than an evolution of style, sensibility and speaking voice that continues to echo across time through music. By tracing Eliot’s poetic development, engaging in a close reading of the poem and evaluating the poem's reception at the time of publication, I will culturally place “Prufrock” among the best teenaged rock songs, rather than simply leave the poem malingering in a dusty old book. In the end, I hope the reader of this paper can then return to
“Prufrock” as if for the first time, to think of it outside of the textbook, as a work of art that speaks to issues at the forefront of consciousness in a modern teenaged wasteland.
II. Eliot’s Studies in Poetics and Consciousness
“Gonna get my Ph.D./ I'm a teenage lobotomy” (The Ramones, “Teenage Lobotomy”).
In this section, I will highlight a few decisive moments in Eliot’s education, readerly development and early poetry that evolve into “Prufrock”. In the timeline set out by A. David Moody in his authoritative 8
biography, in the year of 1905 Eliot first shared his poetry with others during high school at the age of seventeen, in the form of a verse with a clunky title “If Time and Space, as Sages Say” (15). Biographer
Peter Ackroyd characterizes Eliot’s earliest poetry as full of a “preoccupation with the passage of time” and relying heavily upon the utilization of Romantic images of nature in a state of decay or dying: as Moody anecdotally remarks, “the flowers are forever withering” (Ackroyd, 32 and Moody, 17). Moody sees these very early poems as “faintly evoke[ing] the poetic effects” of Romantics and Victorians including
“Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, of Tennyson, [and] Arnold” (17). I will explore the relationship between Eliot and these immediate predecessors, Matthew Arnold in particular, in greater detail later in this paper, but for now, please note that we understand young Eliot to be well versed in Romantic and Victorian poetry and even writing in these styles.
So, if Eliot’s earliest poetry is “acutely aware of waste, the emptiness of passing days, of the need to use time,” not surprisingly so is he: graduating high school in three years and immediately beginning studies at Harvard in 1906 (Ackroyd, 31-32). Then, in December of 1908, as biographer Ronald Bush emphasizes, “a book Eliot found in the Harvard Union library changed his life: Arthur Symons's The
Symbolist Movement in Literature ’ (Bush). Moody reiterates this notion of Eliot’s encounter with the
French Symbolists as a turning point, observing “the effect of his reading Laforgue was that he was galvanized into being himself’ (18). Eliot also evolved his poetic voice through reading another French
Symbolist featured in Arthur Symon’s collection: Baudelaire. To recall the quote in my introduction,
Baudelaire shows Eliot “that the sort of material that I had... an adolescent... in an industrial city in
America, could be... the source of new poetry...” (128). Thus, if in 1908, Eliot realized that he could use his actual surroundings and experience as substance for poetry, then what better way to generate more 9
source material than for the young Eliot to travel to France? Which is of course exactly what he did
(Moody, 18).
After a slight delay due to a scarlet fever scare, a setback that perhaps became a gift in disguise, as the patient metaphor is crucial to "Prufrock,” Eliot undertook a postgraduate year in Paris in 1910 at the
Sorbonne (Bush). Not only did Eliot complete Prufrock between 1910 and 1911, he also completed all the poems that were published later in his first collection: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "La Figlia Che Piange," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (Bush). Critic Stanley
Sultan utilizes Eliot’s own epistolary account to clarify the history of "Prufrock;" the poem “was conceived some time in 1910’” and then Eliot took “‘several fragments which were ultimately embodied in the poem’” with him from Harvard to the Sorbonne, finishing the work during a visit to Munich in “‘the summer of
1911’” (Eliot, as qtd. in Sultan, 78). Eliot therefore would have been twenty-two turning twenty-three while composing "Prufrock," a fact which Sultan finds remarkable, exclaiming how miraculous, that while Yeats continues to pound away at “high romanticism,” that the young Eliot createf this piece of innovative,
"inchoate Modernism" (78).
As Sultan extols of Eliot, “a graduate student barely into his twenties evolved for and embodied in a poem: focus on the process of consciousness; a formal strategy identifying the subject with the expression of that subject” (78). Sultan’s reading veers dangerously towards a focus on the originality and
individual talent of Eliot, speaking of the poem as if it was a meteoric miracle against a dreary horizon of exhausted Romanticism: the first shot from Eliot’s canon of genius that forever changed the direction of poetry (77-90). However, Eliot himself would eschew this type of reading. As Eliot later asserts in his 1928
"Introduction" to Ezra Pound’s collected verse, “true originality is merely development; and if it is right development it may appear in the end so inevitable that we almost come to a point of view of denying all
‘original’ virtue to the poet. He simply did the next thing” (9-10). Along these lines, Eliot’s own readerly 10
trajectory directly informs the development of his verse as he branched out to read emerging alternate voices in poetry. As Eliot’s biographers emphasize, the poet developed the next thing in his own verse through his engagement with the French Symbolists.
Ackroyd observes that in encountering Laforgue, Eliot was changed utterly by “recognizing himself through someone else;” thus, development emerges first as an expression of identification, and then through conversation with the past about how to move forward, how to survive and make sense of a changing world (34). Eliot describes his voice in his earliest poetry as “directly drawn from the study of
Laforgue,” for Eliot became “engrossed in working out the implications of Laforgue” (qtd. by Schuchard,
214). Critic Ronald Schuchard suggests that rather than just seeking to adapt the rhythmic patterns and dramatic situations of Laforgue, what Eliot intends by the word “implications” is the “thematic-symbolic” consequences (214). These “implications,” are thus two-fold; for on the poetic landscape, the French
Symbolist movement represents and provides an alternative to Victorianism and Romanticism, and on a personal level, Laforgue expands Eliot’s awareness of what poetry could be, giving him new horizons to apply his sensibility (214). Thus, the late nineteenth-century works of Baudelaire and Laforgue give Eliot a template to express his frustrated youth, philosophical wanderings and urban experience through the poetic persona of the urban voyeur and young flaneur (Ackroyd, 33-34). As Hannoosh reiterates, these poets taught “Eliot how to speak the language of teenaged visionary experience” (345).
Yet, what exactly is this “teenaged visionary experience”? (Hannoosh, 345). Hannoosh’s phrase first suggests a means of registering difference through the rejection of the previous generation’s vision of
Romantic apprehension of Nature and experience of enlightenment; ultimately vision is something as simple as seeing differently. In order to tease out what these new ways of seeing through poetry might be, let us explore Eliot’s early poetry to see how his voice develops through engagement with the example of the French Symbolists. Bush elaborates on the impact: “Laforgue's combination of ironic elegance and 11
psychological nuance gave his juvenile literary efforts a voice” (Bush). Schuchard’s essay suggests that we can best see the emergence of Eliot’s personal voice through drawing out the way he engages and plays with Laforgue and provides insight into the way Eliot emulates and modifies Laforgue. For, on one level
Eliot takes from Laforgue the anti-Romantic pattern of “ironically undercutting the explicit, implicit, or expected sentimentalism of a dramatic situation,” yet, as Schuchard elaborates, “he then turned the ironic technique of deflating the emotional sentimentalism in the poem against Laforgue by further mocking the philosophical sentimentalism underlying Laforgue’s lunar symbolism” (214). Expanding Schuchard's specific focus, we can deduce that reading Laforgue provided Eliot with even more material to subvert.
As Schuchard summarizes, in Laforgue characters seek to escape from the sordid urban world through some enlightening inner reality of divine metaphysical order, which the poet often portrays as a personified female moon sometimes “explicitly addressed as the soul” (215). Schuchard points our attention to how this “lunar lady” becomes “consistently mocked and debased” in Eliot; she and nocturnal rendezvous of moonlit introspection represent “the deluding Inner Light, of the Romantic, sentimental attitude toward the nature of Man and the Absolute” in Eliot’s early works (215). I find Schuchard’s minute analysis very helpful as most criticism focuses on Eliot’s replication and adoration of Laforgue, rather than on what Eliot undermines, twists and shifts in his development towards something new. I will continue to follow
Schuchard’s specific focus to discuss the overall ways Eliot plays with Laforgue. Then I will address how initially contrived irony, in poems such as Eliot’s 1909 "Conversation Galante," becomes transmuted into
Eliot’s personal voice in 1910 "Preludes" and "Spleen," and finally into "Prufrock."
Schuchard sees Eliot's "Conversation Galante" as “modeled roughly on the dramatic dialogue in
Laforgue’s 'Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot,' where the meditative male, who keeps ‘one eye intent upon the Unconscious,’ talks to a threatening representative of all womankind” (216). Eliot clearly takes 12
Laforgue’s series of events as a pattern: wherein a poem presents itself as a conversation or dialogue and a female presence functions as a threat, the same formula he later expands in ’’Prufrock." While he recreates the basic structure of Laforgue in "Conversation Galante," Eliot ultimately undercuts any sense of insight or salvation, which an image of some mysticized Absolute order could provide to a man stuck in a boring conversation with an aggressive woman. Eliot even pushes to the point of mocking the masculine persona for trying to create any kind of escape through poetic musings.
In "Conversation Galante," Eliot positions the female as he describes in his essay on Baudelaire, where the woman functions as what divides man from spiritual or enlightened experience (Eliot,
“Baudelaire,” 381). Ironically, Eliot taunts the narrator for trying to have a spiritual or sexual experience, really, for trying to do anything at all. Even before encountering all the Laforguean connections through
Schuchard’s analysis, my initial reading of "Conversation Galante" focused on the pattern of undermining:
Eliot systematically replaces climactic universal insights and classical poetic tropes with a dead-end moments of conversation and mundane objects. For example, Eliot's narrator condescends to the “moon,” as
“our sentimental friend,” and replaces this lunar symbol with “an old battered lantern hung aloft;” by using the visual connection as a slippery slope of metaphoric realization, he lowers the moon instead of lifting the world up to it (1 and 4).
The final effect thus emerges as a poem about spent symbols, over-played poetic objects and plots, and a creeping sensation that cultural insistence upon these tropes only alludes to a fear of emptiness and dried up creativity. While Eliot’s bold demonstration of actively displacing classic symbolic imagery with modern imagery forms a more extreme pattern, he draws this conceit from Baudelaire’s more subtle use of asserting modern world objects as new symbolism. As Eliot writes, “Baudelaire gave new possibilities to poetry in a new stock of imagery of contemporary life;” yet, “not merely in the use of imagery of the sordid life of the great metropolis,” but through “the elevation of this imagery to stand for something much more 13
than itself (“Baudelaire,” 377). Thus, in the case of "Conversation Galante," by comparing the moon to an
“old battered lantern,” Eliot implies that manufactured objects of the modern world have replaced nature’s function in real life, and, consequently, objects of the modern world should replace nature as a meaningful symbolic language in poetry (4). Furthermore, rather than providing some moment of beholding the beauty of Nature or some insight into cosmic grace, the lantern serves a practical purpose “to light poor travelers to their distress” (5). By not providing a Romanticized insight, but instead highlighting impending danger or struggle against the backdrop of darkness, Eliot’s image offers neither destruction nor salvation, just one of uncertain gravity and unknown ends.
This “distress” could thus just stem from traveling home to a desolate tenement apartment or it could be a deadly threat lurking around the corner (5). Eliot’s new image speaks to both the failure of
Romanticism to provide authentic meaning to the modern world, but also to the uncertainty of modern urban living: what we might see in the dark can no longer be Romanticized as the moon or portrayed, as by the Symbolist, to be some ecstatic joy in drunken insight or moral depravity erased by the next dawn. Eliot speaks to the extremes of Baudelaire as showing “damnation in itself is an immediate form of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last gave some significance to living” (378-379). Along these lines, later in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," Schuchard observes Eliot portraying a “Laforgeuean lunar traveler unmasked,” who cannot recall the vision of truth he had the night before (217-218). As Schuchard points out, all this traveler remembers are “broken, twisted, artificial things,” and the smell of dust and cologne (218). Eliot’s early personas are incapable of anything approximating damnation or salvation or insight or catharsis, and the ironic detachment culminating into the end of the poem forms the only escape from ennui. In Eliot’s early verse, we see him fine-tuning a sort of irony that can envelop the extremes of the Romantic and Symbolist vision into the shades of gray of experience: the hazy half-forgotten memories of miserable afternoons spent in frivolous, tedious company. 14
Returning to "Conversation Galante," in trying to regain his female companion’s interest, the narrator then references the sound of someone banging away a weary nocturne meant to “explain / the night and moonshine” which, he informs the lady, effectually gives form to “our own vacuity;” and I want to pause here to breakdown the layers of irony packed into such a deceptively simple line (8-10). First, if the nocturne attempts to shed light upon some hidden corners of human experience, in doing so, it compromises the complexity of nighttime through asserting a cohesive, simplified and repeated representation that could explain the darkness away. That some evocative chords could stand for the whole experience of nighttime is “inane” and anyone ludicrous enough to find this finished product meaningful must be not thinking about it (12). The narrator sees the effect of this music as not emotionally stirring, but more fundamentally disturbing; for, this nocturne insists upon its own substance through alluding to a romanticized experience so inflated and expansive it is in fact inauthentic and exhausted of meaning and therefore empty.
Broadly mocking Romanticism as an art movement with his choice of the Nocturne, Eliot attests to the mirage of manufactured emotions masking the emptiness of those, such as the woman in this poem who are drawn to it. Eliot continues to develop this formula, as he elaborates this scene in a later work,
"Portrait of a Lady," by adding even more blatant sexual discomfort through an implication of Chopin as representing female desire for foreplay. Eliot’s portrait of this lady is more a mirror of a young man’s crisis: she is narrated to us as a projection eliciting his fears that might otherwise remain exclusively his and instead she exposes and threatens to dispossess him. In "Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady" and "Conversation
Galante," I read the narrator’s horror in the face of women as systemic of a larger repulsion from a mindless substitute of an outdated, simplified Romantic aesthetic for artistic authenticity in a complex modern world.
For example, a genre such as the Nocturne does not raise questions of how human experience of nighttime and the moon changed from say, when Chopin mastered the form in the 1830s, to when Eliot writes in the
1910s. Therefore, by clinging to comforting and rarified art, the consumer can distance themselves from 15
any intellectual necessity to account for the experience of rapid changes brought about through the advent
of electricity, increasing urbanization, increased mobility and scientific discovery.
Eliot mocks this notion of art as unsullied by the exigencies of the modern world, showing it to be
empty and its assumed purity to be tainted by feminine desire for immediate gratification through easy
aesthetic pleasure. By gendering Romanticism and associating it with the worst stereotypical female
qualities, Eliot speaks to his feeling that this art as castrates creativity and functioning solely as a
commodity for titillating the bourgeoisie. Accordingly, in "Conversation Galante," the moonlight becomes
a sentimental ghost of some meaningful past, so to now try and make it stand for something, or mean
anything in the present seems “inane” (12). After the narrator mocks the music, the woman inquires sharply
if he is implying she has bad taste in music and Eliot markedly splits from the narrative voice as he then
mocks the narrator who attempts to speak poetically to the woman despite his better judgment. The
narrator’s rational distaste of her sentimental taste becomes subjugated to the demands of Romanticism,
which carries a complicit implication that Romanticism functions as a prelude to sex and that artistic
pleasure distracts from the lack of intellectual fulfillment.
In the narrator’s lines calling the woman “the eternal enemy of the absolute,” he speaks as if under
a Laforguean spell, expressing how the distraction of female flesh has pulled him away from his spiritual
quest (14). Schuchard reads the tone to be a double-prong of irony, seeing Eliot mock French Symbolism
for building up poetry as a quest for the Absolute and therefore failing to fully escape the trappings of
Romanticism (216). I would add that lines 7-18 also suggest that the female character functions solely as a
mechanism; the deeper metanarrative irony in "Conversation Galante" might therefore be that the narrator
and the characters and the scenes proposing reality are all ultimately exposed as poetic mechanisms. This
shocking possibility undercuts the intimacy of French Symbolist and Romantic first-person subjectivity;
Moody concurs my apprehension: “Laforgue is never so objective [as Eliot]" (20). Moody offers that in
Eliot “the feat of detachment is therefore all the more extraordinary, for somehow the poet has contrived to 16
stand outside his world without placing himself in the realm of imaginary” (20). Eliot develops his voice through presenting French Symbolist patterns and strategies yet remaining outside his poetry; I think this grants him an ability to watch the poem work and calculate the effect for Eliot’s approach is ultimately cerebral. Eventually, Eliot realizes the limitations of the extreme objectivism he practices in "Conversation
Galante" to develop a mechanism of an engaged first-person subjectivity as a hook in "Prufrock:" for Eliot grants Prufrock the privilege of mocking himself.
Thus, through Eliot’s reading and re-working of the French Symbolists he develops a voice by drawing momentum from being in conversation with their work. While many critics, such as Joseph
Maddrey, simply note that Eliot translated Laforgue into English, Schuchard draws our attention to the way
Eliot actually subtly plays with and transforms the paradoxes of Symbolism. When Eliot’s mocks his own
narrator in "Conversation Galante" with the line “at a stroke our mad poetics to confute,” Eliot essentially asks what can Symbolist poetry prove to be except another strain of Romanticism that confuses Absolutes for answers (17). So Eliot realizes he must push forward and seize upon French Symbolism as a movement on the verge of some great shift in poetry, on the verge of Modernism. Eliot sees Baudelaire as “inventing] a new kind of Romantic nostalgia... a poetry of waiting rooms,” and I think young Eliot puts himself into this narrative to speak to what actually lies in other rooms, rather than idealizing the moment of rapture as a place where some imagined, inexplicable insight or joy is awaiting (379). Thus, Eliot’s early verse tackles the unfinished business of Romanticism and French Symbolism.
As critic A.R. Jones describes, with the publication of "Prufrock" in 1917, “English poetry was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century” (215). This apt metaphor conveys my sense that Eliot’s voice seeks to push past poetics to speak to the present world in new ways. To explore this idea,
I will turn to another poem Eliot wrote and published during 1910, entitled "Spleen," which Sultan reads as a clear precursor to "Prufrock" (82). The fact that Eliot began writing "Prufrock" one month later, initially 17
invites examination of "Spleen," and Sultan is not alone in his critical focus on this work, for as Moody elaborates, “it is with 'Spleen' that Eliot begins to deal with his own world and to find his voice” (Sultan, 82 and Moody, 20). In homage to Baudelaire, the title is after "Spleen et Ideal;" and Eliot is using the French sense of this word to signify “excessive dejection or depression of spirits” (Moody, 20). Sultan asserts, “in it
["Spleen"] many early traces of "Prufrock" can be seen including images of urban world,” and “a personified Life who is ‘bald,’ ‘fastidious and bland” speaking to “an ironic condescension to the futility of life” (82). Returning to Schuchard’s in-depth analysis, "Spleen" more specifically tells the story of “a masquerade of pious church-goers consciously going through their ritual social graces,” a sight that plunges the speaker into “splenetic dejection” (Schuchard, 219). Schuchard also sees this personified “Life” which the poem leaves abandons “anxiously ‘on the doorstep of the Absolute’” as anticipating Prufrock (219).
Schuchard reads this poem as expressing “an acute awareness of spiritual torpor,” wherein this personification waits for salvation with no clear notion of how to open the door (219). I would add to this reading that Eliot’s early poetry largely focuses on a methodology of escape from social situations of empty rituals and expired culture, so this personified Life finds himself trapped between a community in which he finds no solace and an interiority from which there is no way out.
Neither Schuchard, Sultan or Moody directly address why Eliot shifted from the flat personification in "Spleen" to the fleshed-out persona in "Prufrock," and this is precisely what I think I can add to the discussion with my reading of Prufrock as a teenager. For, while "Spleen" appears to be an early attempt at some images of "Prufrock," the shift from personified Life to first-person narrative indicates
Eliot’s purposeful development towards a more authentic speaking voice through a mind laid bare: Eliot's poetry thus comes of age through the persona of a teenaged narrator. In "Spleen" Eliot tries out a personified Life, and it fails to satisfy his poetic needs; the personification represents or alludes to modern experience, but it does not speak directly to it. Eliot needs a decisively Modern persona to speak directly to 18
the reader and what better choice than an adolescent in a city to mediate Modernity directly to the reader?
Eliot used a teeneaged persona to mainline Modern consciousness through the epicenter of developing present in a liminal temporal space between the past and the future, between youth and adulthood that spoke to the future.
Eliot provides us a clue of how to speak directly when he elaborates his discussion of originality:
“the poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad; it is, in the bad sense, ‘subjective’ with no relation to the world to which it appeals” (qtd. in Nicholls, 55). Crucially, the poem should appeal to the world; a conceit Eliot manifests in the first lines of "Prufrock:" “Let us go then, you and I...” (1). With these lines,
Eliot develops a dynamic speaking voice vibrating with simultaneous rejection and invitation of the reader.
This style is antithetical to "Spleen," where the poet limits the reader’s involvement by directly positioning the narrator as the you, such as the lines, “repetition that displaces / your mental self-possession / By this unwarranted digression” (4-6). Thus, through purposefully transforming personification into a persona,
Eliot discovers poetic momentum by utilizing exposed and externalized subjectivity. In addition, through a confusion of intended addressee, Eliot breaks down the boundary between the poem's narrator and the reader, engaging directly with the reader and the reader’s own doubts. When first encountering the poem the beginning feels so conversational, it takes a second to read these lines as the start of a poem. Once the reader recalibrates their approach to the informal invitation as the start of a poem, the reader still has to wonder if the narrator speaks to the reader, to himself, or to another character in the poem. In this way, the
“Prufrock” is predicated upon narrative anxiety and a feeling of insecurity and hesitation for the reader and the poem's speaker. In this clever way, Eliot seeks to start a dialogue to regain meaning through conversation between art and the real world, and between the poet and the reader.
With Prufrock’s opening lines, an immediate confusion of pronouns arises, as to if the “you,” is intended to be the reader or a real or imagined companion (1). This confusion adds depth to the hesitating 19
atmosphere and engages the reader’s fear of rejection or assumed inclusion. As critic, James Haba writes, the “peculiar beauty of this poem" might be that "our hesitations and reservations" "exceed” Prufrock’s (55).
Yet, if we do take the invitation, our guide just leads us deeper into this uncertain world, constantly evading our questions and avoiding any answers; by playing with our expectations as reader, as companion, and as to what a poem should even be, Eliot alerts the reader to the fact that world has changed and so should its poetry. Prufrock’s desire to escape seems weighed down by his doubt and inability to know exactly what to say as he finds himself at the end of youth and brink of maturity. In this world of glimpses and touches,
Eliot uses poetry to dramatize the sensation of distance and proximity between internal self and external experience. Prufrock’s individual teenage angst registers the voice of an emerging young adult urban population with too much time on their hands. Eliot thus articulates cultural anxiety over a changing and uncertain atmosphere by exposing the insecurities, desires and flaws of Prufrock through the narrator’s consciousness laid bare.
Eliot praised Dostoevsky’s “gift” for “utilizing his weaknesses” and used this in "Prufrock," with the state of protracted suffering, in which Prufrock watches himself as if an etherized patient, not sure if what he sees is real or drug-induced, if he will ever wake up for this escapist dream or hallucinatory nightmare (qtd. in Cuda, 397). Prufrock’s weaknesses unlock his poetic capacity. Along these lines, by seeking to expand an individual’s state of mind to mediate the modern world, Eliot speaks to broader cultural concerns through the mechanism of an unleashed, sprawling consciousness and engagement with the reader’s own doubts. According to Eliot, the aspiration of the poet emerges as the elevation of verse into a greater pattern of poetic narrative, by “transmuting something rich and strange into something universal and impersonal,” in order to engage the reader in new ways of exploring consciousness as an apparatus of culture (qtd. in Schuchard, 213). By externalizing internal consciousness, Prufrock speaks to the reader through the mechanism of a mind laid bare. The effect of this narrative voice is one of opening up, of 20
opening up the reader to new, youthful and modern expression by adapting narratives from the past to make new meanings in order to account for the urban jungle and an increasing population of young adults looking to make meaning with their time.
In addition, Eliot provides the reader a momentary break from our own interiority as we escape through the position as addressee beholden to Prufrock’s nightmare. The poem lures the reader in with this hook: it tells us that we might matter as a confidant and companion. We matter because we might understand what the speaker is attempting to say, which is presumably why he asked us to accompany him.
So even as he evades our questions, we fill in the blanks of his thought process. Our horrors become his horrors or we reject his horrors and anticipate our own as Eliot provides the readers a Mad Libs for modern experience and the body of experiences expressed by Prufrock to relate to. Eliot would later write in 1919 that the poet should seek to create something greater than himself: “what happens then is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 40).
Elaborating this concept, Eliot suggests that, “the poet has not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 42). Thus, Eliot uses Prufrock to mediate modern experience to the reader by collapsing the ironic outside perspective of the poet with the narrator to reveal a self-aware consciousness that seems very much alive in the present moment. Eliot's choice of a teenaged persona to mediate Modern experience not only makes sense symbolically, but also shows us how he was writing for a future generation, for those seeking the new or the next in poetry.
Eliot in "Prufrock" becomes just as he writes of Baudelaire, “in some ways far in advance of the point of view of his own time, and yet was very much of it” and by ironically detaching from previous expressions of existence, Eliot creates a model of engagement with the world that still today provides of
Modern mechanism for accounting for experience (“Baudelaire,” 371). For Eliot, Baudelaire’s fundamental 21
flaw is that his grand personality and extreme lifestyle inform his verse and tie it to a specific person and time; as Eliot elaborates, “Baudelaire had the strength to suffer - he gathered pain to himself and studied his suffering,” but due to the personal nature of his work, “much of what is perishable has entered”
(“Baudelaire,” 374 and 376). Ultimately, for Eliot, Baudelaire, “made modern art past the frontiers of the mind,” which he thought could be dangerous, reckless and destructive (qtd. in Cuda, 402). On the other hand, Laforgue demonstrated more control, speaking in shades of cool, aloof irony and this level of detachment appealed to Eliot and I think that in "Prufrock" he was working toward a poetics that tamed the wild recklessness of Baudelaire, yet melted the icy exterior of Laforgue.
As Maddrey points out in his study of literary influences on Eliot, Laforgue “always remained standoffishly amused by his subjects,” while Eliot “dares to express...horrifying emotions” through his personas (18). Maddrey eloquently describes how in Eliot’s early poetry, “Laforgue is simply a mask that
Eliot wears; as he writes more and more, the mask slips” (18). This process of slippage towards new poetics demonstrates what critic J. Hillis Miller terms ‘“the linguistic moment,’ in which ‘the poetic medium reflexively taking itself as its object, renders itself or its refrentiality opaque and problematic’” (qtd. in
Nicholls, 54). Unpacking this complex statement, Miller’s “linguistic moment,” emerges as the performance of language transforming meaning through the process of the poem and not through the poet's personality.
While I think Miller draws our attention to how a poem tries to be a world in and of its self, I also think the
“opaque and problematic,” referentiality of "Prufrock" is alleviated through Eliot’s concrete objective correlatives. The world of "Prufrock" overlaps with ours. For, as Nicholls sees, modern poetics explore “the division or tension between the subject and its other. For while the persona or mask might seem to suggest merely a concealment of the self, it actually exposes poetic identity as a complex weave of different times and different voices” (Nicholls, 54). Thus, with Eliot’s increasing impetus to an extinction of personality by 22
speaking through externalized personas rather than from personal experience or a pure subjectivity, the
French Symbolist mask falls and Eliot’s own mask emerges.
Poetry about what is awaiting remains structured upon what has already been lost; Eliot’s narrator in "Conversation Galante," if we take him speaking as a self-aware French Symbolist, speaks of the nocturne to indicate the loss of authentic experience of the moon, showing that he has already lost the lady’s attention and, finally, that he remains damned to refute the poetics of the past in a hope to create his own verse. In this way, this narrator demonstrates Eliot working through his admiration of the French
Symbolists with rising awareness of their predictable tropes and limitations. Laforgue justifies his detachment and ironic disposition and Baudelaire vindicates his depravity through the pursuit of some higher artistic purpose romancing an Absolute. Just as Eliot writes of Baudelaire that he is “the offspring of
Romanticism, by nature the first counter-romantic in poetry,” Schuchard writes of Eliot that he takes this direction one step further, developing an “antiromantic sensibility” (Eliot, “Baudelaire,” 376 and Schuchard,
219).
Thus, Baudelaire undermines the simplicity of attaining Romantic exaltation or enlightenment through his twisted urban benders, which afforded him an approximate touch of this sublime experience. In
Eliot however, the sea-girls do not, even momentarily, sing to Prufrock. The structure of "Prufrock" is not predicated upon some Romantic moment of illumination, but rather it is based upon an alternate narrative asserting authenticity of consciousness over the ideal of epiphany. Eliot’s sensibility that can paint everything in an anti-romantic light, even Laforgue’s beloved moon or Baudelaire urban tourism. In
Prufrock’s love song, he has lost nothing because with or without love and passion he ends up dead, no absolute and no insight intervening and offering an escape from ennui and annihilation. The poem’s conclusion amplifies the relentless anti-romantic narrative, as Eliot constructs a rich sensibility of irony, 23
undermining the reader’s expectations and creating a new cultural narrative for adolescent modern experience.
III. Prufrock the Teenager
“We come from chaos, you cannot change us Cannot explain us and that's what makes us We are the ageless, we are teenagers” (Public Image Ltd).
As Eliotic hermeneutics prescribe, reading "Prufrock" as a development also suggests evaluating contemporaneous cultural changes to see what was evolving in a broader sense. Since my reading focuses on the age of the persona of Prufrock and the significance of this choice, let us evaluate emergent demographic changes from during Eliot's early lifetime. As "Prufrock" and other early works, such as
"Portrait of a Lady," were initially drawn from Eliot’s life in American cities, I start our statistical inquiry here and then expand to look at the European cities of Eliot’s travel in 1910. In 1880, the decade of Eliot's birth, 71.8% of the total population of America was considered to be living in rural areas while only 35.1% of the population was considered to be living in urban centers; yet in only thirty years, this statistic had switched from urban as minority to a pretty even split with 54.4% in rural settings and 45.6 in urban environments in 1910 (U.S. Department of Commerce). As these numbers demonstrate, the urban landscape rapidly became the trending reference point for American environs, especially for the younger generation born into urban life.
European cities of course had some time on American cities for sheer volume, but the direction of growth appears in equally striking, skyrocketing numbers; London grew from 2,320,000 in 1850 to
6,586,00 in 1914 and Paris from 1,314,000 in 1850 to 2,714,000 in 1900 (Tomka, 331). These statics indicate that Eliot lived in an era where both America and Europe were undergoing a marked shift in demographics, resulting in the overall effect of cityscape replacing countryside for a rapidly growing number of the population. In addition to this dramatic movement to urban centers, the demographics of the 24
population were also shifting and for the focus of this paper on age, let us now look at life expectancy. In
Boston, where Eliot would attend Harvard in the early 1900s, the life expectancy for a white male in 1850 was in the thirties, yet by 1900, this number had increased into the fifties and by 1910 it was nearly sixty
(Klein, 115). So, being in one’s late teens had gone from being two-thirds through one’s life in the 1850s, to being only one-third of the way into one’s life in 1910, when Eliot writes Prufrock. Suddenly life stretched out as an expanse and children had more time to grow up, more time to wallow in the state of being between youth and adulthood, in this state of being teenaged.
Teenagers thus emerge as a by-product of modernization. By the early 20th century, young
Americans and Europeans increasingly had more time to grow up and "Prufrock" speaks to the emerging experience of this category of identity: the anxiety, horror and boredom of protracted adolescence. While the word "adolescent" comes from old French and first started appearing in the 13th century, it is this state of protracted adolescence evolving in the 1900s that snowballs cultural anxieties as to the state of the youth and the ramifications of this newly produced category of identity ("Adolescent," Oxford English
Dictionary). In his Introduction to Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture 1875-1945, writer and journalist Jon Savage calls our attention to "the history of the quest, pursued over two different continents and over half a century, to conceptualize, define, and control adolescence." While Savage’s research is of much broader scope and time spectrum than covered in this paper, the Introduction to his study provides helpful information regarding his process of reclaiming the pre-history of youth culture in order to best chart the development of the teenager through time. Savage discusses early "vivid, volatile precedents]," such as Romantic notions of youth put forward by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late 1700s and then how over the nineteenth century these one-offs multiplied so that "as the twentieth century gets into its stride...the voices of youth become less corralled by adults and more frequently heard on their own terms"
(Introduction.) Thus, Savage sees the turn of the twentieth century as the real tipping point to where this emerging population of outspoken, self-aware teenagers pushed the cultural need to conceptualize adolescence to the forefront of cultural consciousness. 25
For example, Savage draws our attention to the fact that in 1904, American psychologist G.
Stanley Hall began drawing attention, in scientific and psychological research realms, to adolescence as a specific epoch in life with the publication of his Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to
Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (Introduction). Such a long- winded title draws our attention to the fact that little research appears to have been done into the topic if
Hall felt he had so many areas to cover. In his Preface, Hall eloquently argues for the need to approach emerging social identities and alter psychological assumptions in response to a changing world, stating "the studies of the mind need new contact with life at as many points as possible" (vi). To summarize, Hall calls attention to "our urbanized, hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its time," and since "modern life is hard, and in many respects increasingly so, on youth," society should really start treating adolescence
"as a new birth," requiring specific structure, nurture and care, separate from initial birth into youth (xi, xiv and xiii). As Hall characterizes the experience, "youth awakes to a new world and understands neither it nor himself," as if seeing the world for the first time for what it is, as "the functions of every sense undergo reconstruction, and their relations to other psychic functions change, and new sensations, some of them very intense, arise, and new associations in the sense sphere are formed" (xv and xiv). Hall's account of adolescent experience resonates with Eliot's description in "Hamlet and his Problems," where this specifically heightened sensibility forms new associations rapidly in a disorienting state of developing self- awareness and awareness of the world.
Teenagers thus developed from the chaos of modernity as offspring without a clear past and with a dubious future, Hall sees adolescence as demanding further study, being "in most crying need of a service we do not yet understand how to render airight" (xviii). Eliot’s parent’s generation did not understand how to deal with their teenaged children, for when they grew up this stage was not protracted and little credence was given to adolescence being a separate epoch requiring special attention; as a 1980s Times magazine article referenced by the Oxford English Dictionary asserts, “teenagers, of course, had not been invented in the 1880s” (“Teenager"). As Hall's study clearly had a lot of ground to cover and the word “teenager” does 26
not appear in print until 1922, at the time Eliot writes his early works, he engenders a dialogue regarding an emerging phenomenon of modernizing identity (“Teenager,” Oxford English Dictionary). To reiterate, with
Prufrock, Eliot utilizes a persona speaking from a place of teenagehood, utilizing a rapidly evolving category of identity representative of Modernity to speak to new experiences. Unlike the personified Life of
"Spleen," Prufrock is an authentic persona gathering together cultural change by embodying a modernly produced identity of being a teenager.
As critics Miller and David Spurr both emphasize in their readings of "Prufrock," the confusion of tenses expresses restlessness with self and surroundings, a state of mind that aligns with Hall’s characterization and what might now be called teenage angst. A catchphrase such as teenage angst captures a body of experiences and gathers it into a linguistic sign, like a signature, that encapsulates the essence of this expansive range of experience. By containing a sprawling, unruly topic into a singular unit of representation, we can isolate and dissect a complex concept. The Prufrock body functions in this way as a unifying signifier of experience. Eliot utilizes the Prufrock persona to express a variety of experiences and to explore new frontiers of consciousness, for which there were not easy verbal equivalents. As Eliot writes, Baudelaire and Laforgue show him that “the business of the poet was to make poetry out of the unexplored resources of the unpoetical” (To Criticize the Critic, 126). Eliot thus develops Prufrock from reading the French Symbolists verse full of unpoetical “teenaged experience” (Hannoosh, 345). The
Prufrock persona bridges the gap between sign and signifier for he functions as both; Eliot overrides the limitations of language to speak to authentic, unexplored areas of modern experience by pushing the frontiers of first person subjectivity to emulate the experience of consciousness.
Ackroyd describes that through Eliot’s encounter with Laforgue, Eliot “could see himself clearly from the outside, as it were - and in that act of self-identification he learned how to speak freely for the first time” (34). Through Prufrock, Eliot externalizes his own readerly process of identification and seeing himself outside him self, developing a culturally viable narrative predicated upon intimacy between reader 27
and speaker. Furthermore, if Eliot feels changed through reading another poet speaking to teenaged urban experience in an authentic way, it seems Eliot might want to recreate this sense of connection for his readers, to offer a foothold of meaning and identification in an unstable, changing world. Eliot speaks freely by baring the mind of his teenaged narrator and letting the reader troll through this persona’s consciousness; so that, on one level Eliot exploits a persona’s vulnerability through projecting Prufrock’s mind to the reader and, on another level, he invites the reader to connect with this startlingly authentic portrayal as possibly a mirror of their own Modern teenaged consciousness. He stages coming of age as a narrative of uncertainty, discomfort and existential crisis and offers the reader a chance to identify with this experience.
In a later lecture, The Frontiers of Criticism, “Eliot recommended that readers of a poem should endeavor to grasp what the poem is aiming to be.... he suggested they should try to grasp its ‘entelechy,’ a word which in Aristotle emphasizes purpose” (Mays, 108). I would argue that “Prufrock” is aiming to be a new voice in poetry, a development of the past into a poem that embodies an emerging category of identity for which language alone is inadequate; the poem aims to be a new narrative of experience and consciousness providing meaning to coming of age as a teenager in the Modern world. Establishing
Prufrock as a teenager attests to what I interpret Eliot as aiming to do with this poem: to push the experimental innovations of the French Symbolists to connect with an English tradition of poetry through utilizing an unstable Modern identity as a mechanism for encompassing all experience and exploring the unpoetic. I think critics might be overlooking the fact that "Prufrock" arises from the failure of "Spleen;" the personification in "Spleen" is Mitchell's concept of Prufrock as a caricature of a middle-aged Modern
Man and Eliot clearly discards this type of immature, faulty crutch in favor of a more authentic, developed narrative voice. If Eliot is trying to find material to write "new poetry," would he not want a fresh voice, a voice that is very much of the present {To Criticize the Critic, 126)? Eliot thus follows his own directive to poets by engaging “in the present moment of the past...not of what is dead, but of what is already living,” 28
through Prufrock the teenager (“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 44). Now, I want to turn to the poem to discuss why the age of the narrator is an essential question of the poem reference the textual moments that lead me to my reading of Prufrock as teenaged.
Prufrock’s obsession with aging and time naturally raise questions regarding the eponymous narrator's age. To answer this fundamental uncertainty, critics generally follow readings such as David
Rosen's in his article “T.S. Eliot and the Lost Youth of American Poetry,” that focus on Prufrock’s reference to his bald spot in order to nail down the narrator as unequivocally middle aged. I find it surprising, that despite all of Prufrock's evasion of questions and inability to say what he means, critics generally take his self-representation literally, reading him as the middle-aged man he describes in these lines. Yet, Prufrock mentions concerns over what people “will” say about his signs of age, rather than what they currently say, which indicates a future tense fear rather than a presently occurring phenomenon, suggesting that he is not yet old, but rather imagining becoming so (44). In addition, I read Prufrock’s bald spot as referencing his apprehension of sexual inadequacy, the creepy sensation of eyes on the back of his head and, on an even deeper level, that too much of his mind is visible to those around them (4). He feels “like a patient,” being
“spread out,” dissected, studied and ultimately judged (3 and 2).
Rosen emphasizes the peculiarity of the twenty-something poet taking on the voice of a middle- aged character pathetically obsessing over his receding hairline and lost mojo (488). Yet, Rosen does not question critical consensus as to the narrator’s age and just tries to makes sense of Eliot’s odd use of a middle-aged narrator as a means for Eliot to assuage concerns of lacking poetic authority (484). However, taking into account the young narrators in Eliot’s other early verse, such as "Portrait of a Lady," and his re working of the French Symbolists as we have discussed, Eliot exhibits no prior pattern of relying upon the age of his narrators to establish authority. If anything, he demonstrates a missive of writing from an adolescent point of view in order to best address present Modern experience. So, while Eliot’s Prufrock 29
certainly speaks of middle age, I read these concerns around growing old as expressing a young man’s anxiety about entering into adulthood, rather than middle-aged man’s fear of encroaching old age. I find it important to assert this reading of Prufrock as a teenager in order to position the poem as connecting to both Eliot's poetic and critical oeuvre and to a larger cultural narrative of young adult experience that became an essential script for modernity.
In terms of directly relating "Prufrock" to Eliot’s critical works, Prufrock’s allusion to Hamlet provides an excellent starting point Reading the poem, with Eliot’s body of work in mind, I naturally turn to Eliot’s later essay on Hamlet to see what this allusion might mean. In his essay "Hamlet and his
Problems," Eliot discusses adolescent experience as a type of poetic sensibility, writing that “the intensity of feeling without any object, or exceeding its object.... often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down by his feelings to fit the business world; the artist keeps them alive by the ability to intensify the world to his emotions” (126). Thus, for Eliot, an adolescent point of view embodies artistic intensity of feeling and offers a valuable means of translating experience through intensifying the world to match the inner sensation. In Eliot’s critique, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a failure because the playwright fails to adequately intensify the world in an authentic way and by giving Hamlet insufficient situations to sort out, the "mad" prince's emotions seem disproportionate (126). Really the bottom line for Eliot is that Shakespeare's Hamlet is incapable of seeing himself outside himself, he lacks self-awareness and irony and, as such, is bereft of a modern sensibility.
Eliot distinguishes that “the Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not the explanation or excuse” (126). Unpacking this statement is tricky, but Eliot is speaking not of literal age, rather, of a type of persona as a mechanism for translating a sensibility and perspective.
Eliot is discussing Laforgue's posthumously published Moralites legendaires, a series of six short stories written in 1887 from the point of view of literary characters, including Hamlet, written in paradoic style. It 30
seems that Eliot realizes the possibility in Laforgue's version of the play for the adolescent consciousness as capable of crystallizing an expression of Modernity. Looking at other critical responses contemporary to
Eliot's 1919 essay show a similar anticipation of the Modern nature of Laforgue's ironic Hamlet. As critic
James Huneker elaborates in 1915,
"Laforgue's Hamlet is of tomorrow, for every epoch orchestrates anew its vision of
Hamlet. The eighteenth century had one; the nineteenth another; and our generation a
fresher. But we know of none so vital as this fantastic thinker of Laforgue's. He must
have had his ear close to the Time- Spirit, so aptly has he caught the vibrations of his
whirring loom, so closely to these vibrations has he attuned the keynote of his twentieth
century Hamlet" (91).
Thus, when Eliot writes "Prufrock," he is also seeking to continue to cultivate Laforgue's "twentieth century Hamlet" (Huneker, 91). We can infer from Eliot inclusion of a reference to Hamlet in "Prufrock," that he is very much purposeful and aware in trying to develop Laforgue's adolescent Hamlet beyond parody of an original into a mechanism for expressing Modern experience.
When Prufrock declares, "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be," continuing to say he is more of a Polonius type anyway, he is placing himself into this continued narrative of Hamlet's through time (111). No other exclamation points appear in the poem except in alarmed and anxious parenthetical asides about hair, receding on his head and appearing on the arms of women, so this sharp interruption certainly draws our attention to the narrator's protest as expressing a fear of his proximity to the character of the infamously indecisive Hamlet. Yet, Prufrock is Eliot's "Hamlet of Laforgue," an adolescent whose sense of being beholden to watching himself fail is ironically translated through Prufrock's projections of his thoughts; Prufrock is not mad, he is Modern. Eliot thus realizes that taking the sensations and anxieties of adolescence provides a mechanism for transforming the unpoetic world into art. This idea of intensifying the world to one’s emotions for poetic exegesis forms the backbone of Eliot’s notion of “objective 31
correlative,” an idea he also develops in his essay on Hamlet (124). As Eliot demonstratively asserts, “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 that particular emotion” (124-
125).
In this way, emotions should not be described or exaggerated, but rather embodied. While I would suggest to Eliot that the ghost offers an object that matches the extremes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I understand from his brief analysis that the main issue is that the world of the play vastly does not reflect the horror Hamlet speaks of and Hamlet sees unaware of this discrepancy. Eliot sees Shakespeare as failing as an artist to make poetic the “intractable material” of the play; basically Eliot, thinks Shakespeare was sloppy, superfluous and lacked intentionality with the disquieting material he stirs up, so that the puzzling inconsistency makes the play an “an artistic failure” (123). Along these lines, recall that for Eliot “the source of new poetry,” could be found in turning “the intractably unpoetic into poetry,” thus as in his essay on Hamlet, his poetics is based upon the need to wrestle with, and give form to, intractably unpoetic material in order to create art (Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, 126). The objective correlative thus functions as a way to bring stubborn gray matter into form through concentrated, purposeful artistic visioning, the sort of all-encompassing sensibility that is concentrated adolescence. Prufrock and his teenaged sensibility therefore intensify the world through figurative exaggeration and isolated moments of unease to show the morbid horror and boredom, insatiable desire, and uncontrollable repulsion of Modern life. Objective correlatives enable Eliot to contain intractable, unpoetic sensations and translate these to the reader through poetic images; for a quick example, the "butt-ends of my days and ways," carry a multiplicity of associations, translating an apprehension of wasted time, uncontrollable automatic behavior, repetition and monotony, fear of chemical dependency and an insatiable desperation to take the edge off (60).
To better grasp this nuanced concept of objective correlative, critic Bernard Sharratt offers an important distinction between Eliot’s objective correlative and the poetic mechanisms of his 32
contemporaries, the modern school of imagism (234). As Sharratt describes, imagists such as Pound, used simple direct language to build to a single image metaphor as lynchpin to the poem’s insight (234). For example, Pound’s famous "In a Station of the Metro," “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough;” this is a striking and direct metaphor connecting the faces to petals, while the use of the word apparition implies a certain gloom and describes the crowd like a phantasm until related to a stark image of nature (1-2). Thus, through the contrast of white and black this metaphor elevates our perception of both images; Pound provides an instantaneous, intuitive discovery that this modern world of the metro station is just another type of natural environ: an urban jungle. While still building images into significant sites of meaning, Eliot disrupts this precise, focus of the imagists by invoking a swirling series of images with a multiplicity of connotations, like a chain reaction to explore consciousness through an all- encompassing sensibility. In Eliot the imperative of insight is displaced by the prerogative of stream of consciousness authenticity.
Prufrock speaks in external monologue further externalized through the images that form objective correlatives to specific states of being and complex emotions. Eliot picks up the monologue form that had been frequently utilized by the Romantics, Victorians and Symbolists, but develops a means of being outside his speaker while drawing the reader in with the phantasm of permeable first-person subjectivity. I call Prufrock a phantasm for he is the performance body, or illusion, of singular consciousness and not collapsible with the poet as a real first-person narrator or a character. Prufrock is a projection of Eliot’s poetics. Eliot’s play between external poet and objective reality, and internal persona and subjective vision, builds a unique tone of voice and approach to speaking. As critic Charles Altieri describes, “it is the wary indirectness that seems most striking, as if for the first time poetry took account for a cultural situation”
("Eliot's Impact on Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Poetry," 196). While I would contend that
Romanticism and Victorianism took into account the “cultural situation” as a response to urbanization and apprehension of cultural bankruptcy, I think Altieri ultimately intends to highlight Eliot’s tone in "Prufrock" 33
as not forcibly and obviously poetic with a certain moment of insight in mind, but more familiar and conversational tone without fear of raising ambiguous images to allude to life as complex and unresolved.
In a later essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot elaborates the reasoning behind his approach:
“our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity...the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (248). Eliot’s engagement with this cultural “variety and complexity” through the use of allusions, temporal fluidity and modern world images, forms this tone Altieri perceives as groundbreaking ("The
Metaphysical Poets," 248). Through an externalized monologue projecting human consciousness in the present moment of the modern world, Eliot seeks to “dislocate language into his meaning” (“The
Metaphysical Poets," 248). To begin this process, Eliot immediately disrupts expectations of narrative voice by utilizing a narrator speaking from a point of disordered experience, a chronological gap between childhood and adulthood: a teenager. Prufrock embodies what Eliot wishes to indicate about the experience of culture and identity at odds with time, body, perception, reception, voice and place in the world; Prufrock as a teenager provides Eliot an all-encompassing mechanism of experience and a new voice emerging in the modern world capable of disrupting boundaries through expressing and embodying change, conflict and complexity.
The teen years stand as a metaphoric presence of a transformative gap between childhood and adulthood so this position is one capable of bridging the extremes, the hypocrisies and the ironies as one undergoes development and identity formation. Thus, from an authorial perspective, the teenager offers a threshold space of frightening unpredictability with extreme instability of identity that functions as a mechanism capable of containing this disruption while disrupting. The importance of reclaiming Prufrock as a teenager is to realize the poem’s role in seeking to place itself at the epicenter of Modernity through engaging in a narrative of urban adolescent identity. Returning again to Eliot’s quote in my introduction,
Baudelaire shows him “that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, 34
in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry” (To Criticize the Critic, 126). For Eliot, the source of new poetry lies in these urban images and adolescent experiences, the complex material of
“the present moment of the past... not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (“The Metaphysical
Poets,” 44). "Prufrock" thus amalgamates Eliot’s earlier attempts at working with this sort of material, as he seeks to transmute ‘something rich and strange, [into] something universal and impersonal’” (qtd. in
Schuchard, 213). This “‘something rich and strange,'” would be Eliot’s own experience as an urban teenager and he pushes to transform his specific subjectivity into a universal narrative through objectively opening up a teenaged consciousness to the reader’s view (qtd. in Schuchard, 213).
As Eliot writes, “the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 42). Prufrock as teenaged mechanism mediates modern experience. The peculiar mindset and preoccupations of Prufrock all read as the journal entry of a particularly creative and morbid teenager. Prufrock’s discomfort with female sexuality, distaste for social obligations, nocturnal wanderings, suicidal fantasies and philosophical musings, typify behaviors we have come to consider as teenaged. Prufrock must sort through nightmares, fantasies, and fictions, as he seeks for a true self he is not even sure exists, is worth seeking, or will even satisfy him when he finds it. Prufrock struggles with self and self-expression; he feels he has to “prepare a face,” to meet certain people but cannot shut up about it
(27). He claims to not be a "prophet," but then predicts his own entire miserable future (83). In the fourth stanza, Prufrock insistently repeats the refrain that “there will be time,” and “time yet for a hundred visions and revisions” and the thought of all this time hanging heavy on the horizon like the “etherized” evening is paralyzing (23, 33 and 3).
After imagining all the future taking of “toast and tea,” and the circuitous redundancy of the women who “come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” Prufrock finds himself exhausted (34 and 13-14). 35
Arrested in his ennui, he then begins to start to imagine himself in old age: “with a bald spot in the middle of my hair” (40). I read all these conflicting moments not as Prufrock the character of the neurotic, overly intellectual elitist middle-aged man, but as part of Prufrock, the archetypal teenager, already bored with the routines of life and rebelling against the demands of society. Thus, in "Prufrock" we meet a young man uncomfortable with his impulses and desires, constantly confronted with social demands of who he is supposed to be and subsequent sensations of failure to be this, or to want to be anything really, pushing him to fantasize his annihilation. Prufrock’s desire to escape seems weighed down by his doubt, confusion, and inability to know exactly what to say as he finds himself at the end of youth and on the brink of maturity. In this world of glimpses, touches and distance between self and experience, Eliot’s voice emerged as Modern for its ironic self-awareness, narrating consciousness as an out of body experience and articulating internal anxiety through an external atmosphere, speaking to the intractably complex relationship between self and environment. The awareness of being in a Modernizing world as the unprecedented present, felt out of time and place, so Eliot naturally chose a narrator who speaks from a similar position by virtue of his adolescent consciousness.
IV. Eliot as Victorian Child Coming of Age
“And when I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me and if the day came when I felt a natural emotion I’d get such a shock I'd probably lie in the middle of the street and die I'd lie down and die” (The Smiths, “Nowhere Fast.”) 36
In addition to teasing out Eliot’s engagement with the French Symbolists, another powerful way to articulate the development of Eliot’s voice can be found in how he engages with poetry from the
immediately preceding Victorian and Romantic periods. I find a comparison between "Prufrock” and two poems from the oeuvre of Matthew Arnold to be particularly fruitful. I chose Arnold's work since many critics consider him to be “a precursor to Modernism" (Mazzeno, 77). In addition, as Jeffery M. Perl’s article "Dictatorship of Relativism" highlights, in his lectures entitled "The Use of Poetry," Eliot speaks directly of Matthew Arnold; Eliot characterizes Arnold as being out of touch with the “horror and glory” of modern life, but knowing “something of the boredom” (qtd. in Perl, 356). I find this quote very intriguing and by unpacking Eliot's account of Arnold provides additional insight into Eliot's poetics and the evolution of the Prufrockian model. Similar the French Symbolists, Arnold offers Eliot a bridge from the past to the future development of poetry, yet in this case Eliot's criticism of Arnold informs his progression. As Eliot describes during his lecture, "in the criticism of Arnold we find a continuation of the work of the Romantic poets with a new appraisal of the poetry of the past by a method which....gropes toward wider and deeper connexions" (114). Eliot sees Arnold as engaging in the focus of his lecture, the "progress in self- consciousness" which epitomizes the development of poetry in Modernity, but ultimately finds Arnold overwhelmed by attempts to assert poetry as superseding religion and philosophy (106).
Eliot's criticism boils down to his perception that Arnold "hardly looks ahead to a new stage of experience," and "never saw life as a whole," remaining stuck in "a painful position," between "faith and disbelief' (95, 103 and 106). My focus is not defending Arnold in the face of Eliot's criticism, but rather to point out that Eliot is greatly engaged in pointing out exactly the limitations of Arnold and desiring to destabilize the boundaries that hedged in Arnold's poetics. I would like to suggest that Eliot finds in
Arnold's criticism and poetry, the material of Modernism, for it is part of the development of self- consciousness and awareness of the need to push poetry to say new things in new ways. Arnold himself feels part of the progress of poetry as a medium articulating shifting cultural consciousness. In an 1869 37
letter to his mother, Arnold writes, “my poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it”
(qtd. in Ferry, 153). Thus, both Eliot and Arnold articulate strong investments in what poetry should say or do in the face of the changing mental mindscape of Modern cultural, yet, as we will see, Arnold’s rendition of these concerns skews into poetry as a moral or pedantic tool providing comfort and guidance to a spiritually bankrupt and suffering Modern society, leaving Eliot space to explore the unclaimed territories of Arnold’s poetry.
Let us first look at similarities between Eliot's 1909 "Prufrock" and Arnold's 1855 poem, "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse.” In this work, Arnold describes the protagonist as “wandering between two worlds, one dead, / the other powerless to be born” (85-86). By undertaking an action of wandering, yet having no power to make either world come to life, Arnold creates an atmosphere of ambivalence and futility: this “something of the boredom,” Eliot finds in Arnold that he develops in "Prufrock" (Eliot qtd. in
Perl, 356). Imagining himself tight-roping the boundary between a dead world of the past and an unborn world of the future, Arnold’s speaker could inhabits a threshold temporal space and could very much be a teenager as well. Arnold’s narrator awaits some change in the world around him in protracted state of reflection. In his article, "Arnold and Tennyson: The Plight of Victorian Lyricism as Context of
Modernism," critic Charles Altieri observes that Arnold begins to speak in tones of Modernism about
Modernist issues, but his “particular vision of culture as a critical tool keeps forcing Arnold back on his subjective problems while ironically complicating his efforts to achieve a personal voice” (288). Altieri therefore suggests that Arnold’s development of a poetics becomes constrained by the burden of the ethical and moral responsibility to awaken a culture to its own degradation and decline. 38
Thus, Altieri discerns that Arnold’s personal voice becomes subsumed into a larger Victorian trope of the social-minded tract about the suffering of all and the righting of social injustice. For example, consider the progression after two elegiac, initially Prufrockian lines:
“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears, the world deride— I come to shed them at their side” (Arnold, 85-89).
After melancholically musing on his identity and temporality that defy categorization, Arnold's narrator turns to Victorian investments in strife over existence and a shared suffering in urban toil. We can follow
Altieri to infer that Arnold considered his artistic responsibility as one of speaking to the cultural plight, of addressing poverty, human rights violations and urban conditions; Arnold's work therefore attests to a sense of spiritual and aesthetic bankruptcy experienced in a world of rapid secularism and commodification.
Arnold’s speaker seems to be collapsed with the poet himself, indicating a feeling of being crushed by the weight of an artistic soul attuned to social responsibility and the overall enormity of such a task. Arnold therefore speaks to the state of disillusionment and Eliot picks up this discourse at the state of being disillusioned through the narrative voice of "Prufrock."
In Arnold’s narration, he offers no reprieve from this forlorn, forsaken state of affairs; existence seems to be mocking the narrator: “for the world cries your faith is now / But a dead time's exploded dream” (97-98). While these lines could be the unspoken dialogue of "Prufrock," to substantiate his narrator’s experience of the world, Eliot encapsulates emotions into objects. Eliot provides physical evidence for Prufrock’s experience through externalizing an internal monologue and displacing Romantic longing for insight with an all-encompassing sensibility of Modern disillusionment. For example, Eliot's
“evening spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table” embodies the sensation Arnold 39
describes of powerlessly wandering between the past and the future (2-3). Critic A.R. Jones draws our attention to the “aggressive modernity” of these lines, as “their conceit shocks the reader,” as any kind of anticipated insight expected from this classic symbol of the expansive evening sky becomes strategically replaced by a restricting and delimiting morbid, modern image (215). Schuchard concurs, seeing the poem's
“startling imagery” as "wholly rejects Romantic apprehensions of nature,” signaled from the initial image of the night sky suddenly supplanted by a scene from medical theatre of the etherized patient (110).
Altieri argues that while most critics simplify Eliot’s critique of the Victorians as a natural inclination to reject immediate artist predecessors, if we instead pause to uncover how Eliot registers his departure through direct engagement with Victorian poetry, we can gain excellent insights into Eliot’s poetics (281). Critics overlook the extent of Eliot’s engagement with the Victorians quite possibly due to
Eliot's essay on the Metaphysical poets, wherein he denounces Victorians as suffering from a “disassociated sensibility” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 247). As Eliot expands this phrase: “It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne... and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose" (“The Metaphysical
Poets,” 247). Eliot’s notion of sensuous perception relies upon engagement with thought as immediate and timeless; therefore, it is an epoch, yet also an endless narrative of seeking meaning: an intellectual and aesthetic quest across time. Through this process, Eliot believes the poet can “dislocate language into meaning,” as he brings the reader back into sensuous contact with language at the aporia between a word and its meaning in order to reenact the formation of meaning as an act of personally and culturally viable signification (“The Metaphysical Poets," 248).
To see Eliot registering his development through departure from the Victorians, let us return to a comparison with Arnold's verse. For example, what exactly does Arnold intend to intimate with the phrase, 40
“dead time’s exploded dream” (98)? The emotional impact of this statement loses force as we are lost in the words, not sure what the narrator means. This phrase could be read as an elegiac statement that mourns the death of the past, or of past hopes, and it could also just be a description of how time feels frozen. The explosion of the dream suggests this dream’s potency is dispersed and now spent, distant, and never to be found again. In "Prufrock" however, Eliot provides a proliferation of objective correlatives to substantiate the state of emotion hinted at by these line from Arnold’s verse. For instance, Prufrock’s assertion “I know the voices dying with a dying fall / beneath the music from a farther room,” or the images of “all the butt- ends of my days and ways,” and, "measuring] out" "life in coffee spoons” (52-53, 60 and 52). All of these lines are poignant in their specificity, immediacy and physicality; the way Eliot localizes and disperses metaphysical abstraction into everyday real world objects emerges as a strategy of translating consciousness. Recall Eliot's investment in exposing the unpoetical as the material for new poetry to build authentic meaning through direct engagement with the Modern world. In addition, the directive of authenticity overrides the imperative of insight, so Eliot's poetry naturally hovers in the dusty gray area between a unified vision and a disordered dream.
The bottom line for Eliot is the reader’s experience and he therefore seeks to emulate Dante,
Donne and Laforgue to create a “mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,” translating the sensation of consciousness, of being alive in that moment, to the reader (“The Metaphysical
Poets,” 247). While Eliot utilizes metonymic builds to metaphoric reveals, he works to “directly connect objects to feelings so that both are as immediate” which produces a sense of meaning being made through consciousness unleashed (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 247). By drawing the poles of metonymy and metaphor together, Eliot’s poetry enacts a type of transformation, wherein the real objects of the world stand for larger metaphoric meaning. With images such as the sky becoming a patient, Eliot imbues objects with the atmosphere and with increasing meaning, creating a texture engaging multiple levels of cultural 41
consciousness by localizing awareness, meaning and reality not on another plane, but in present everyday objects. In his groundbreaking work on metonymy, linguistic theorist Roman Jakobson describes this process: “following the path of contiguous relationships, the realistic author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to setting,” so that the precise atmosphere and setting become integral to meaning of objects and to the overall work (1114).
Consequently, it is “perfume from a dress” that makes Prufrock’s mind "digress” (65-66). As
Prufrock's mind jumps constantly between interiority and exteriority, Eliot, the poet, very much controls this movement as an exercise in metonymy, weaving an overall metaphoric structure that breaks down the boundaries between thought and objects and between consciousness and environment. Eliot criticizes the
Victorians for what Altieri characterizes as a “tendency to hypostasize...because they lacked lucid analysis and dramatic control” (281). With this statement, I think Altieri absolutely hits the nail on the head: Eliot abhorred this perceived lack of dramatic control and substitution of the absent or longed-for absolute reality for the present and concrete authentic experience of meaning. As Eliot states, "Arnold represents a perioud of stasis," "his poetry is too reflective [and] too ruminative" (95 and 114). For Eliot, Arnold's criticism furthermore embodies these problems, for when Arnold states that "'the greatness of a poet...lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life,"' Eliot points out that such an ill-conceived, loose statement implies that ideas function as “a lotion for the inflammed skin of suffering humanity" (Arnold as qtd. in Eliot, 104 and Eliot, 104). Eliot’s reading of Arnold’s aesthetic statement forms a perfect example of the aesthetic Eliot seeks to create through generating objective correlatives to replace vague thoughts with concrete images, in a way that is not always pleasant, but frequently derisive, dark and ironic.
Altieri therefore argues that Eliot’s Modernist impulse arises from engagement with Victorian poetry and that Eliot condenses the amorphous Victorian texture of Tennyson and Arnold into the concrete building blocks of Modernism. Eliot transforms Victorian amelioration into a cure for Modern consciousness. Eliot's material for Modernism therefore lies in what he perceives as the unfinished, 42
unresolved business of the Victorians: thoughts without objects, disturbing corners of the mind accumulating dust and the exhuming buried lives. As Altieri specifies in terms of Arnold, with Arnold's
“access to deeper private or at least pre-linguistic parts of the self, Arnold leaves Modernism a heritage in which the public analytic language of self-consciousness and the dream of a profound, unconscious authenticity are irreconcilable and yet necessary features of human being” (292). Arnold thus engages in a dialogue of self-consciousness and authenticity, yet positions these ideals beyond words. Such a positioning dramatizes the distance, or alienation, that individuals feel from awareness and authenticity, and that the poet experiences from both the world, and the seeming intractable distance between his words and his desired meaning.
Arnold's aesthetic vision precludes escape into irony or the defense mechanism of poetic techniques, such as Eliot's objective correlative, for the Victorian poet remains forever beholden to an ideal; as Altieri articulates, “when one needs a total vision...to overcome his alienation from the present, one is not likely to find a satisfying dramatic image or objective correlative synthesizing the various strands of the discourse” (288). Crucially, Eliot does not begin "Prufrock," from the point of view of his Victorian upbringing of Arnoldian alienation from the present, wherein the world fails to realize and support Arnold's vision; Eliot instead marks his coming of age by rebelling against the limitations of this paradigm of alienation from the flawed extant world through fearlessly engaging with the fragmented present as the source material for new poetry. To reiterate, growing up in a world of failed absolutes and fear of false reality, Eliot develops artistic survival mechanisms, evolving new poetic strategies ironically undermining
Victorian alienation, through positioning engagement with the present and relentless self awareness as the site for new poetry.
In "Prufrock," Eliot thus disperses the tension of a potential failed epiphanic build into a multitude of unfinished sentences and further displaces this tension by asserting real world images as containing significance and meaning. Whereas the pressure and directive for a singular consecrated insight 43
overwhelms the speaking voice of Arnold’s " Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse,” Eliot's speaker negotiates his modern space with a flowing consciousness emulating authenticity. As Altieri observes,
Arnold places the “self-reflexive turn immediately after a typical Romantic meditation on the present scene;” as “the poet turns on himself and recognizes his alienation, ‘ And what am I, that I am here?’”
(Altieri, 288). The speaker of this poem cannot reconcile his vision of what should matter with the exigencies of his day to day life; as Altieri envisions, the poem’s only answer to this questions is in effect ‘I am one who will never be here; I have given my heart away to an ideal faith that only mocks present experience’” (288). With these lines, Arnold thus expresses his sensation of alienation from the present in terms of separation from an ideal, with complete sincerity, holding up no ironic shield to cut the tension.
Altieri explicates that Arnold’s faith here is not religious, but rather a belief in the sanctity and purity of a cohesive cultural vision (288-289).
Altieri considers Arnold’s melancholic pathos as expressing the plight of Victorian lyricism, wherein “culture still gives ideal versions of the self, but now it becomes a history of those whose ideals have failed; culture itself becomes only another dead religion, at once oppressive and inescapable in the impotence of its monumental grandeur” (288-289). While Arnold’s verse positions culture as the solution, his poetry problematizes this assertion by veering towards an escape from this crushing burden. As Arnold cries in "Grand Chartreuse:”
“Be man henceforth no more a prey To those out-dated stings again! The nobleness of grief is gone Ah, leave us not the fret alone!” (105-109).
Layered expressions of abandonment form a refrain of departure, yet Arnold offers no destination for this escape. The new world is “powerless to be born,” and the grief experienced in the face of wandering a dead, inhospitable earth no longer satiates the lyrical needs of the alien artist (86). This plight becomes, as the 44
title of Altieri’s article asserts, the ’’context of Modernism." Modernism, such as Eliot's verse, destabilizes the burden of recovering what was lost with cultural change and urbanization, by replacing this overwhelming absence with the presence of something new, that could overcome the tension between
Romanticism and Empiricism and exonerate poetry into exploring strange new terrains of experience.
There is a poignant beauty to Arnold's aesthetic of seeking noble truth and attesting to melancholia and nostalgic sorrow, so 1 would specifically add to Altieri’s analysis that Eliot exploits the poetic potential of the struggl ing artistic souls of Romanticism through the incomplete thoughts and dialogue in "Prufrock."
Eliot presents Prufrock’s allusions to ineffability and the inexpressible pain of unrealized everyday existence through deceptively complex cutaways to dialogue scenes lacking specific temporality. For example, as readers we are not sure if these conversations have actually occurred, are presently happening, or if Prufrock imagines these scenes as evocative visions of future misery and failure: this layering of possible temporalities engenders an overriding and unnerving sensation of anxiety expose from all sides. In some cases, the reader cannot even be certain who is speaking; for example, consider the following lines:
"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'" (107-110).
In these lines, we are not sure if the quotation marks indicate that the dialogue is that of the companion or reader, or if this punctuation alludes to Prufrock's out-of-body experience observing his socially-constructed persona interact with social scenes. The absolute sorrow of a lost moment to clearly express one’s self and the additional loss of meaning through another person's misunderstanding, exploits tropes of Romantic and Victorian regret and melancholia.
In other words, Eliot uses Victorianism and Romanticism as material for Modernism, he condenses the power of lyrical sorrow into these minute dialogue scenes which invoke the nostalgia of his youth: harnessing the power of his idealistic, lyrical Victorian childhood, Eliot develops the French 45
Symbolist "poetry of waiting rooms," into a bittersweet Modern teenage ballad, a love song that is not about love at all (Eliot, "Baudelaire," 379). Prufrock's song is about giving form, giving embodiment, to the
Modern disembodied consciousness and forming a poetics that speaks authentically to what lies beyond the past through projecting a presence and a future presence. For when Prufrock does complete a thought, such as “ragged claws / scuttling across the sea floor,” he speaks in Modernist tones, projecting his mind into a concrete dream of what he desires to be (5). Prufrock's sense of feeling absent in the vessel of his socially performed self, can be materialized through this image of the crab, which expresses an existential moment of all-inclusive temporality. Eliot develops the negatives, he looks to the fog, the dust, the darkness, the lingering dialogue, the present vagueness and the sensation of absence, the haunting future and the rapidly disappearing past and seeks to give all these seemingly disparate pieces of self-consciousness form.
"Prufrock" thus articulates a shift from Romanticism to Modernism, as Eliot leaves larger questions unanswered and instead asserts metonymic footholds snowballing into an authentic rendering of what it means to be a Modern consciousness in the present world. Thus, "Prufrock" demonstrates the process of disengagement with Romantic ideals and displacement of these cultural and poetic modes of exegesis and catharsis as Eliot, the poet, remains outside his narrative voice, killing Prufrock off when he begins to wallow in Romantic pathos at the end of the poem. Prufrock's apprehension of the sea-girls not signing to him is not a straight-forward parody of Romanticism, rather, this moment offers Eliot the chance to clarify his separation from the narrative voice and from Romantic impulses, by asserting that a new way of connecting with the reader through a shared experience of Modern self must emerge if poetry is to mean anything to the Modern world. Prufrock’s self-pity climaxes in the failure of past muses to acknowledge his presence and Eliot eclipses the lyrical potency of Prufrock’s experience with his abrupt decision to drown the narrator.
Significantly, “human voices,” are the impetus of Prufrock’s demise, for the world demands to be related to and Eliot poetically displaces the Romantic melancholia of Arnold’s lyricism with modern irony 46
(131). Through deconstructing Arnold’s dead world, Eliot builds a new one. Eliot disrupts expectations of confessional sincerity and emotional expressivity, through a sly sense of humor wherein Prufrock mocks his own self-pity; for it is not so much that Prufrock is insincere, as that he is completely vulnerable, seeing himself both inside and outside himself. In "Prufrock," Eliot develops failed Romanticism and poetic ineffability into a strand of dialogue subsumed by the Modernist impulse towards authenticity and self- awareness through an oscillating engagement with material culture and obsession with the urban sphere.
Another significant aspect to the Victorian poetic dilemma, lay in finding ways to carve out a place for poetry in the contested space of literature and art, with emerging forms of popular expression, such as the novel and cinema. While Altieri’s interpretation makes the Victorian lyric into a damsel in distress rescued by the striking aesthetics of Modern poetry, I think a more nuanced way to understand the relationship would be to return to Eliot’s notion of evolving poetry.
As I suggest earlier, I see the Victorian lyrics functioning as film negatives that Eliot takes into the dark room and inverses, distorts, blows up, collages and ultimately develops into something new. In addition to realizing he can use the material of being adolescent in the Modern urban world, I would assert that Eliot also realizes he can develop his voice through rebellious engagement with the Victorian poetry of his childhood. On a meta-narrative level, "Prufrock" is a poem about Victorian poetry coming of age, it is a development, not simply a dismissive or extreme departure. Victorianism and Romanticism, like French
Symbolism, hover on the cusp of the twentieth century and begins to address the tensions between the self and the Modern world, yet remain structured on what is lost, whereas Eliot pushes Modernism to be beyond this established point of cultural decline in the face of urbanization, to be about what can be found in the rubble of cultural decay. Cultural decay becomes an assumed extant reality, rather than an obsession with exposing this failure and presenting an escape from suffering, Eliot focuses on the disrupting, contesting and challenging established Romantic and Victorian aesthetics by tapping into emerging young, Modern self-consciousness and modes of technology and popular expression that speak to the future world. 47
Eliot thus aims to make conscious meaning out of this repressed Victorian fear of meaninglessness trembling in the face of modernity; his poetry seeks to overcome a sensation of alienation and an apprehension of the horror of a buried life. By this buried life I refer to an abstract body, referencing a multitude of experiences of interior intractability, baptized into a phrase by Arnold’s 1852, “The Buried
Life:”
“But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life” (45-48).
It is easy to leap at Arnold's suggestion of the "buried life" as one of the first sparks of Modernism, of an allusion to self-awareness of repressed self, that Eliot would later develop in characters such as Prufrock and the Lady in "Portrait of a Lady" (Arnold, 24). As Eliot's Lady refers directly to her "buried life," critic
David Roper reads these lines as Eliot alluding to Arnold in order to call attention to the way Eliot will unbury this life and go beyond psychology to a larger apparatus of experience, a modern sensibility of consciousness through a young adult identity, repulsed by this sad woman suppressing knowledge, for the sake of feeling (Eliot, 10 and Roper, 49 and 55). In both "Portrait of a Lady" and "Prufrock" we see a depiction of surroundings that reflect and reveal the young narrator’s thoughts, many of which indicate an investment in issues of age and intimacy.
I follow Roper’s approach to "Portrait of a Lady," which dismisses a large body of previous criticism that focused on nailing down the woman as one Miss Adeline Mofatt, or reading the poem as a biographical story of Eliot’s romantic liaisons with a specific woman (42-45). Thus, "Portrait of a Lady" emerges not so much a memoir of the possibility of romance with a particular woman, but more about
Eliot’s interest in issues of intimacy and engagement with the world, which he stages through this persona in order to develop a Modern poetics. I do not intend to collapse the narrators of "Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady," but rather to compare how Eliot develops his poetic structure in both poems and how the parallels 48
between the narrators reinforce my argument that Prufrock is a teenager. Both poems assert a male adolescent narrator as the voice of Modernity, who can undermine Romantic sensibility with an overriding sense of authenticity and irony. In both poems, Eliot dramatizes consciousness laid bare and this transparency creates a level of genuineness and intimacy with the reader; this establishes a conversation with the reader through open-ended questions and revealing thoughts that are withheld from the other characters in the poem and this level of trust and intimacy elicits the reader's alignment with the speaker and investment in this style of poetry.
Essentially, with these poems, Eliot utilizes teenaged personas to speak in a Modern way and consequently invites the reader to join this sense of being cutting edge, young, incisive and Modern, showing the reader how to engage with the world and interpret experience through an ironic, disillusioned sensibility. Again, by selecting an adolescent persona, Eliot symbolically chooses a Modernly produced
identity to establish an authentic speaking voice from the forefront of the present. The narrators of both
“Portrait of a Lady” and “Prufrock” present themselves to us as speaking from a psychically conflicted temporal space, restless and uncomfortable in their skin, as they shift between youthful desires and an elitist sense of timeless, exhausted, jaded wisdom. In "Portrait of a Lady," the Lady tells the narrator who is spurning her affection, that "youth is cruel, and has no remorse / and smiles at situations it cannot foresee," and these line flirt with the conclusion wherein the narrator fantasizes the lady's death, his lips uncontrollably curling up into a wry smile (48-50). The narrator's youthful sensibility is shown in direct contrast to the Lady's Romantic sensibility, signaled by her aversion to the narrator's lack of remorse and passion for Chopin, as I previously discussed along with the woman in "Conversation Galante." Thus, Eliot shows youth to be defined as anti-romantic, liberating itself from the juggernaut of regret, by undermining all sincerity with an overriding sensibility of twisted humor and brazen irony.
The guileless quality of the narrator, as he transparently opens up his mind, establishes a type of
intimacy with the reader, where we might find it hard to not mock the Lady and live vicariously through this vicious vision of the Lady's death. Any hints of youthful naivete in this unabashed honesty, ultimately 49
become eradicated by the overriding tones of dark cynicism and brazen superiority, so that the overall effect is one of bold authenticity and acute awareness. Furthermore, though the narrator of "Portrait of a
Lady," asks us, as readers, if he "should have the right to smile," he does not wait for our response (124).
Just as the narrator thwarts the Lady's demands for him to write to her, he does not need our approval to act.
Our trust is not undermined by this turn, but rather reinforced, for if the speaker does not seek our approval, then we can surmise he is expressing himself all the more candidly. This play between permission and propriety places the speaker in a rebellious position; through his insubordination he evades the social demands of a dying world, yet vitalizes the relationship between speaker and reader as the locus of authenticity and play, challenging us to see things differently and take everything with a grain of salt.
The narrator mentions that his “self-possession flares,” when the Lady asks him to “write," as he is frustrated by the social civility that demands he lie and promise to write, even though he has absolutely no desire to write anything to please her (94 and 93). His integrity, his sense of authentic self expression is positioned as more valuable than an idealistic notion of social obligation to provide solace to a lonely, nostalgic old lady: the poem becomes a meta-narrative of Eliot's poetic priorities and provides a venue in which to stage his rejection of past poetic expectations. Strained by social demands and trapped by the confines of his obsessive self-possession, he finds solace in an escape to interiority: a literal, physical severance through “going abroad” and a mental fantasy of escape through imagining the woman’s demise
(88). The imagined death of the Lady leaves the narrator, “sitting pen in hand,” “doubtful of what to feel,” and thus Eliot positions his persona's inability to “relate” to the woman’s feelings, this most unpoetic moment of social discomfort and adolescent rebellion, as the material for poetry (116 and 118). The Lady gathers together a multiplicity of associations from which Eliot seeks to dramatize his difference; she stands for bourgeoisie taste in the form of feminized romantic longing and sorrow for something already lost. Thus, through recalling Arnold’s verse, Eliot's "Portrait of Lady" performs exodus from Victorianism 50
and Romanticism; for the narrator smiles at the death of the Lady, relieved from the burden to speak in the terms, tones and texture of past poetic paradigms.
With the death of the Lady in mind, let us look again at the death of Prufrock. Besides the vague
Romantic nature of the reference to mermaids at the end of "Prufrock," Moody points out the connection to
Arnold’s "The Forsaken Merman," believing Eliot alludes to this poem as a further means of demonstrating the failure of Romanticism through mocking Prufrock’s self-elegy (36). Sultan also reads this scene as Eliot utilizing the mermaids to attest to the failure of Romanticism to provide any forward movement in poetry and to be a frozen moment of solace forever stuck in the past. Sultan considers Eliot to be ironically engaging with Romantic and Victorian era poetry, dragging it to a bitter end, abandoning it by the sea through “exploiting” the tropes and showing them to be empty and exhausted shells of mean ing (80). For
Eliot, the subterranean subtext belied by the emptiness of the parallel images of the sea of Prufrock the crab and Prufrock at the shore waiting for the mermaids to sing to him, raise questions of what is meaningful in life and what it means to exist as a consciousness.
Each time Eliot enacts rapid movements from horrified youth to resigned old man, and from life to death, the reader realizes it is not certain what mode of experience is worse: to be young and too aware, or to be old with dulled senses; to be alive but feel dead, or to be dead to any desire for life. Seeing Prufrock multiply himself through these polymorphous selves, in a constant state of psychic unrest thwarting stasis at every turn, leads to a reading in which he drowns the Romantic version of himself stuck in a moment of nostalgia for the past sorrowful reverie. Just as the mermaids reject him, Prufrock rejects the self that longs for the mermaids to sing to him. Prufrock kills off this weak, melancholic self, this self stuck in a moment of longing for consummation with Romanticism, that cannot survive the onslaught of Modern demands for ironic tones, authentic meaning and direct relation to the world. Shedding this Romantic self like a snake sheds his skin, Prufrock emerges hissing the formula of Modern poetry. 51
As Moody observes, that Prufrock’s “love song should turn out an elegy for himself is very much in the spirit of the age of Arnold, and of Tennyson. What was lacking [in Victorian poetry] was the ability to turn to account either the modern world or the unsatisfied longing for another. The one might be unreal and meaningless, yet it still oppresses; and while the finer feelings only go into escapist forms they confirm its power” (36). In this Victorian paradigm, the desire for escapism or the fantasy of a rich buried life, gives power to the oppressor: the oppressor is both the sorrow of the real world’s inability to live up to this dream and the dream itself, remaining forever aloof gaining in power through continuously denying meaning to the real world. The fantasy is forever positioned as another place and collapses in on itself as it becomes so inflated with idealism that it is empty of existence and meaning; simultaneously, the fantasy empties the world of real meaning and inflates it with false meaning. Over time, the fantasy comes to represent the failure of the world and both the dream and the reality empty each other of meaning. Thus a binary between the dream and the real world emerges and the obsession with a meaningless world of simulacra exacerbates the sensation of cultural failure to recover true meaning and the lack of artistic expression capable of elevating humanity. Arnold is ruled by the dream and longs to rule over it, not to be free from it. In poems such as "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse," he seeks to regain the reigns and cajole the dream into speaking through the ritual of poetic conjuring.
Arnold’s “dead time’s exploded dream" becomes concretely manifest in "Prufrock" through Eliot's portrayal of the world of lingering fog, dust, unfinished business and unasked questions (98). The dream of something else, of a better or richer world kills the version of Prufrock longing for it; he is rejected by the dream, the mermaids do not sing to him, so through Prufrock's death, Eliot renunciates the dream, leaving it at the bottom of the sea, contained in the Prufruckian self who failed to see beyond the limitations of the dream to provide vital meaning and catharsis in a complex, chaotic Modern world. The dream does not speak to Prufrock so he kills the version of himself seeking to engage with this Romantic vision, enacting
Eliot's push to liberate poetry from being beholden to a dead dream of past civilization. Critic John Kwan- 52
Terry provides a compelling insight into Eliot’s process of renunciation and while this becomes a specifically Christian process in Eliot’s later work, we can see Kwan-Terry’s perceived pattern in Eliot’s earlier works as a poetic trope. Kwan-Terry defines renunciation for Eliot as “an understanding of what his worldly desire actually is for,” and in ’’Prufrock” his desire for the dream is eclipsed by his desire to escape the dream (137). I would argue that the melodramatic horror of being beholden to a dead dream is precisely
the subject matter Eliot develops out of Arnold. Eliot almost rewrites Arnold in order to provide an
alternative ending so that Eliot can register a beginning; this is exactly what Altieri intimates as the failure
of the Victorian lyric as the context for Modernism.
Eliot thus supplants the Romantic hero who clings to his faith in this dream, with the modern
voice of power of the poet to speak authentically to Modern consciousness and the fragmentation of the
mind through the increasing complexity of experience. The Romantic Prufrock self equates waking with
drowning, indicating that he has become so acclimated to a pattern of nightmarish spectatorship that he
would not survive in a world dictated by his actions and can only function in the world predicated on his
hesitations. Dying stands as a new form of birth, for by deconstructing old modes of poetic expression and
collecting the best parts into new wholes, a new voice will speak to the surface somethingness and the
subterranean nothingness and the consciousness of past, present and future. As Moody observes, Eliot
shifts the lyrical paradigm from Victorian and Romantic modes, “not by escaping from experience into
anything else, but by so intensifying it that its particulars yielded its universal meaning” (Moody, 30). This
process renounces the Victorian apprehension of the world as a false image of reality, or as failing to
measure up to some cultural and personal vision, by depositing value in the authenticity of expression, the
immediacy of thoughts and new experience as both strange and timeless. A teenaged person is Eliot's
objective correlative to this idea of a re-birth through awareness and the need to reckon with the changed, present world. 53
As I have already touched upon, Eliot’s poetic mechanism of the objective correlative becomes crucial to identifying exactly what Eliot tries to develop from the Romantics and Victorians. A helpful way of describing Eliot’s objective correlative is as a process of mirroring or filming; the objects of Prufrock’s world that he shows us provide a mirror for him to see himself and a film to show us what he sees.
According to Eliot, he seeks to unleash “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion,” so that the reader engages with feelings beyond easy articulation (48).
For example, Prufrock bemoans, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” which expresses a powerful desire for negation of consciousness; this image contains a longing to be a mechanism of survival, removed from thought and the imperatives of human social graces or socially constructed gender roles (73-74). Sociologist Jeffrey Turner points out that during the early 1900s, the era of Eliot’s teen years, the pervasive “preconception of how one should behave in a social setting” would dictate that the man should “initiate courtship behaviors” and “sexual intimacy” (5). Turner looks to the way “cultural role scripts were distilled,” as a set of expectations, such as Emily Post’s etiquette books, where she instructs: “in public places men do not jump up for every strange woman who happen to approach," however, "if any woman addresses a remark to him, a gentleman at once rises to his feet as he answers her” (Post as qtd. in Turner, 6). Prufrock speaks to his failure to live up to these cultural scripts by his inability to speak and his desire to accost anonymous women walking the street at night. Haunted by smells; too timid to hunt, Prufrock longs to just be reflex without thought, an automaton programmed for survival.
As American “urban populations swelled,” at the turn of the century, an “influx of immigration” brought more and more cultures into close contact and women increasingly joined the work force, gender roles, especially in terms of young adult courtship, became a more contested space and "Prufrock" speaks to these cultural shifts and gender pressures (Turner, 5). As a teenager experiencing the pressure of asking a 54
girl out, Prufrock cannot fulfill gender expectations and thus engages in a process of expressing his sense of demasculization through referencing his baldness and his inability to “eat a peach” (122). No doubt Eliot felt the pressure of this social norm and while I am not proposing an autobiographical reading, this cultural context leads me to suggest that Prufrock speaks as a young man acutely fearful of social gender expectations, not a middle-aged man who is already settled into life.
Prufrock expresses discomfort with a socially constructed notion of identity and gender, which significantly relates to post-modern gender theories of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on the subject.
This connection offers another level of textuality engendering dialogue with future generations through opening dialogue on an important Modern topic. As critic Raya Morag describes, “Foucault’s view of masculinity” is as a “discourse of power, with an emphasis on power(lessness),” a concept in "Prufrock” that remains an evocative cultural narrative (27). The emphasis on Prufrock’s sensation of powerlessness begins at the start of the poem with his tone of passive resignation to make the visit; this tone is then reiterated by the “ehterised” sky, the thought of “restless nights,” and the fear of some “overwhelming question” that might be put to him (3, 6 and 10). The lingering nature of the “question...” emphasized by the ellipses that follow Prufrock’s first mention of this inquiry, persists in different unasked questions and unanswered uncertainties throughout the poem, creating a miasma of doubt that permeates the atmosphere
(94).
Prufrock systematically avoids this original question, yet its presence continually seeps out throughout the poem in gradually increasing specificity, from “do I dare,” in the sixth stanza to the final question in the eighteenth, “dare I eat a peach” (38 and 122). The sexual innuendo of the peach condenses the process of the question raising its head at the aporia of intimacy with women. The question therefore becomes a poetic mechanism registering Prufrock’s masculine sensation of powerlessness. Doubting his masculine authority in the human world, Prufrock zoomorphizes his identity in the face of woman, hinting 55
at some subterranean animal nature that lurks under the surface of civility. An insect “formulated, sprawling on a pin,” his sensation of powerlessness forms the refrain of his narrative of masculine experience (57).
The conflict of experience with cultural expectations arises through engagement with women. This objective correlative of a “ragged claws” speaks to Prufrock’s fear of failure as a human through double synecdoche: not only is he this reptilian creature, this creature is just “ragged claws” “scuttling across the floor of silent seas” (73-74). He fantasizes the liberation of reducing himself to a mechanism of mindless survival, which also forms an objective correlative to sex.
Importantly, the narrator arrives at this abstraction after being confronted with possibility of speaking to a woman, whom he synecdoches into a scent. Thus violence enacted by the narrator towards women in poetically tearing their body into parts, “the arms...(downed with light brown hair!),” ultimately forms an objective correlative to the way these women make him feel (63-64). In the case of the arms, the hair makes him aware of his own desires and repulsion at the animal nature of lust. The hair also recalls his horror at the thought of balding which indicates that hairiness is next to manliness, so through this connection, women assume an aggressive powerful role, making his hair disappear and appear on their arms, a sign of sexual power and dominance. Prufrock expresses that he does not know how to approach women except through hidden glimpses and backward glances expressed by the “shawls” and “perfume from a dress” (67 and 65). Immediately his inability to speak to this synecdoche of woman incites apprehension of being lonely in old age, which he projects as “the lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows” (72). All of these male and female images tear the body into surface parts and articles of clothing that perform and fulfill gender role expectations. Eventually transformed into a reptilian sea creature, Prufrock the crab can mate without thought and survive without the need for forced companionship or conversation. 56
We have to wonder if Prufrock’s over-identification with otherness, from the “lonely men” to these
“ragged claws,” indicates crisis, rebellion or escape and I would argue it expresses all of these (72 and 73).
By destabilizing boundaries between youth and old age and between animalia and humanity, Prufrock articulates his adolescent discomfort in his own skin and complicates the notion of stable identity, exposing the failure of cultural scripts to explain and contain experience. Through giving a physicality to gendered experience outside the realm of normative cultural narratives, Prufrock not only speaks to alternative types of being, he embodies and contests normative gender and age expectations through his presence. Opening up discourse on socially constructed gender and the experience of non-normative identity struggling to play dress up to perform a culturally subscribed role, Prufrock’s anxieties will later find consonance in post modern identity theory. For example, Butler’s seminal work, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in
Subjection, emphasizes the instability and irrationality of a totalizing identity; incorporating the terms of both materialized ideology and psychoanalytic psychic subject formation. Prufrock’s rejection of certain norms or modes of behavior such as having tea or talking of Michelangelo, activities that are coded in class and gender, is part of a journey through the meandering streets of psychoanalytic subject formation and identity demarcation.
In her work, Butler emphasizes the psychoanalytic point that ego forms through rejections and through loss of otherness; Eliot’s objective correlatives demonstrate how Prufrock substitutes otherness to alleviate the pressure of trying to reconcile some sense of core self with the self he must perform. In order to be acknowledged by the world, Prufrock must perform a cohesive identity and maintain this performance while being pushed through the compressor of social rituals, so that he can emerge as a named being: demarcated and contained by his gender signature. Thus, Prufrock's identity forms through the context of genderization; in fact, as critic Chris Buttram Trombold provides us in his research, the poem's "draft form bears the parenthetical title "(Prufrock Among the Women)," which implies that Prufrock's relationship to his milieu forms and informs his identity, in a complex chain reaction of interchanging identifications and 57
rejections (95). In addition, this suggests that Prufrock must actively draw boundaries to cordon off and maintain an ego or identity, for otherwise he might be perceived as one of the women, unless he structures his identity aggressively against this female atmosphere. Yet, in both "Prufrock," and "Portrait of a Lady," the women keep oozing into his masculine consciousness and demanding him to align with their needs and to fulfill their expectation of who is gendered self should be. That is to say, the more Prufrock tries to assert his masculine difference, the more women pull down his attempts to erect restrictions and quickly trap him with his own limitations, and the more and more obligated he becomes to meet female expectations and pass female examination in order to escape from their restraints, restrictions and demands.
Fulfilling gender expectations therefore emerges as a type of foreplay mandated by socially prescribed norms and Prufrock falters with anxiety at the idea of measuring up to the social construct of masculinity. That Prufrock presumably has male sexual anatomy, but fails to measure up to the social expectations of the male gender role, demonstrates Butler’s concept of gender as a social construct and
Foucault’s notion of masculinity as a narrative of power and powerlessness. Prufrock feels powerless to move beyond the prelude to sexual engagement, for the pressure of female expectations puts any desires he might have on ice; Prufrock therefore feels conflicted due to the disparity between what is expected and what he feels and experiences. As I have previously discussed, by inhabiting the space of identity anomaly by proxy of his age, Prufrock experiences the burden of social investments in what a teenager becoming a man should be. The inability of his teenaged years to fit into an established category of childhood or adulthood mirrors the expression of his conflicted gender identity, impotent in the face of adult masculinity.
Castrated and feminized by the aggressive, permeating female presence, Prufrock's confusion of temporal existence is further exacerbated by his attempt to establish gender difference outside of social expectation and he therefore ends up drowning amongst the women.
Prufrock’s experience of what it feels like to be a male does not fit into culturally prescribed gender roles or expectations and his concern with his powerlessness in the face of sexual opportunity is 58
both teenaged and Modern. His narrative of rebellion against what would be expected from a masculine speaking voice stems from the lack of consecrated wisdom or insight, the openness of dialogue discussing his experience of inadequacy and the portrayal of the female gender as sexually aggressive and repulsive.
Prufrock’s powerlessness stems not just from a basic discomfort with the opposite sex, but from a deeper insecurity with his identity as being at odds with concepts of masculinity. Prufrock therefore seeks to control this anxiety through exposing the socially constructed nature of gender, showcasing gender's inability to contain or express his identity or to control the women and keep them on their side of the binary. Eliot’s process of undermining cultural expectations through the projection of a teenaged male consciousness, which defies both gender and age, produces a viable narrative to articulate rapidly changing modern life.
I think reading Prufrock’s identity as fugitive provides an excellent condensation of what makes it so evocatively Modern; Prufrock’s identity is in a constant state of running from containment, rules and consequences; as Prufrock avoids questions as if accused of some horrid crime he cannot admit, you wonder at what point he will ask for his attorney. Prufrock’s fugitive identity attempts to escape imprisonment in a socially constructed gender or age role and by fleeing its socially constructed self, it only finds itself as abandoned corners of thought rear up through Eliot’s mechanism of objective correlative.
With images such as the “yellow fog that rubs its back on the window panes, licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,” Prufrock expresses his desire to taste what lies beyond the edge, to develop a palate for the future (16-17). Thus, Modernity seeks to express the gray area, the runaway thoughts that pull the edges of consciousness into frightening and uncertain frontiers in order to escape the stasis of being caught in the headlights of a binary between what is expected and what one feels.
Modernity, the outlaw, provides a renegade dialectic between past crimes and future punishment, through seeking to operate outside boundaries and find freedom through changing the laws. For example, running from social obligations that would fulfill his gender role, Prufrock deconstructs his own body and 59
escapes the cultural rules of gender and sex through fantasizing his alternative identity as an automaton crab at the bottom of the sea. Prufrock suggests he has the rest of his life to “prepare a face to meet the faces” he will meet and then leaps to also having “time to murder and create” (27 and 28). Such a transition is not arbitrary; for, Prufrock implies that every time we enter the world we murder one version of our self and create another one in an endless Sisyphean cycle of never overcoming the obstacle of social expectation in the Herculean task of creating a cohesive self. Prufrock’s conflict emerges as his inability to be who society wants, and yet his unnerving fear that society will not accept him for who he thinks he might be: the mermaids will not sing to him regardless of how he rolls his trousers, in other words, regardless of who he pretends to, tries to, or might really be.
Prufrock’s conceit of displacing his lack of a socially intelligible identity with the metonymic presence of physical objects, not only forms part of Eliot’s poetic agenda, but also emerges as metaphor for
Prufrock’s coming of age narrative. Sliding down a slippery slope of deconstructing his identity in order to form it, Prufrock’s repeated attempt to articulate the specific somethingness of his self through the show and tell of otherness, reflects his extreme fear of having no control over who he is and who he is expected to be. Identity becomes dialectic between socially expressive self and inexpressive inner self and
"Prufrock" narrates the sensation of identity formation as the accumulation of otherness into the vessel of a singular body and onto the screen of a singular consciousness. The naked authenticity of this teenaged mind capable of fugitive, criminal thoughts spawned by his struggle with self-formation on the fringes, provides
Eliot a mechanism for this study in presenting Modern consciousness. Eliot shows Prufrock engaging in active self-representation, attempting to reclaim control over the contested site of his identity; there is a power in his expression of powerlessness for he exposes his weakness, powerlessness, inadequacy and anxiety in the face of social constructs and expectations for teenaged masculinity on the brink of adulthood.
Prufrock is very engaged in showing how disengaged he is and this complex irony contributes to the rich texture of Eliot’s voice as both inside and outside his permeable narrator. Thus, Eliot picks up Arnold’s 60
sensation of walking between two words and develops this consciousness to be born again through
Prufrock, the modern teenager.
V. The Song of Powerless Prufrock
“I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour But Heaven knows, I’m miserable now I was looking for a job and then I found a job And Heaven knows, I’m miserable now
In my life, why do I give valuable time To people who don’t care if I live or die?” (The Smiths, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”)
Now, let us delve deeper into a close reading of ’'Prufrock” to see Eliot’s poetic techniques at work in more precise detail. Eliot's theoretical focus upon direct engagement with the reader becomes instantly transparent; consider the unforgettable first three lines:
“Let us go then you and I When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized on a table” (1-3).
Immediately, a confusion of pronouns arises around the uncertain intentions of the speaker: does the “you” refer to himself, the reader, to a real or imagined companion, or to all of these. This confusion of address introduces the reader to an atmosphere of hesitation and further insinuates the reader into this plot of vacillation through layering a readerly question on top of the questions posed by the narrative. As critic
James C. Haba eloquently suggests, “the peculiar beauty of this poem" might be that "our hesitations and reservations,” as the reader not certain if Prufrock is speaking to us, “exceed his [Prufrock’s] hesitations and reservations” (55). The long-standing critical debate regarding whether or not Prufrock is addressing the reader as the “you,” sets the mood of ambiguity and tone of indecision that will dominate the poem. 61
To find answers to the question of address, let us consider how Eliot recommends readers should approach poetry. Eliot quickly simplifies his discussion, stating "poetry attempts to convey something beyond what can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another”
(Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, 23). The notion that poetry is ultimately one person in conversation with another seems straightforward. Yet applying this focus to Prufrock raises more questions than it provides clear answers. We can never really be sure if the conversation is between the speaker and the reader, or the speaker and a companion in the poem, or the speaker and himself. The multiplicity of relationships suggested by the ambiguously directed narrative voice calls our attention to the complexity of selfhood, wherein the self finds definition through a series of rejections and connections with otherness as I discussed
in the previous section of this paper. Thus, the confusion introduced by the opening lines alludes to a collection of possible relationships, to self and to others, that define an I. In the poem's initial moment of uncertainty, I would argue that the reader is naturally incorporated into the poem; the ambivalent "you" poses as an irresistible call, functioning as a hook to pull the reader in with the promise of intimacy though
invitation or eavesdropping.
Undermining any protocol of a clear address or the social grace of a politely affable one,
Prufrock’s passive resignation of the “let us go,” mirrors the larger destabilization of poetic expectation as any readerly anticipation of a lovely evening sky becomes transmorphed into the grotesque sensation of being “spread out like a patient etherized on a table" (1 and 3-4). The reader at this point realizes we are about to embark on a walk with possibly the most miserable human being on earth. Before we even have a chance to catch our breath, Prufrock tells us not to ask the question that is apparently forming so transparently on our lips. This question is significantly positioned at the end of the first stanza to formally present itself as interrupting the evening stroll; the break in verse replicates the abrupt disruption and emulates the attempt to turn the conversation away from the question. The subsequent ellipsis highlight the narrator’s impotent balking in the face of this query as the passive act of leaving something lingering. This 62
abandoned question therefore hangs like a threat over the following stanzas, mirroring and exacerbating the foreboding and hesitating atmosphere of the poem.
The “certain half-deserted streets... that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent,” replicate the labyrinthine mind of the narrator, who continuously finds physical manifestation of his mental sensations in his surroundings (4-8). Unpacking the complex relationships constructed in this line, let us focus on the parallel between physical and mental sensations. A half-deserted street physically manifests the tedious argument and these two concepts become further linked through a shared feeling of insidious intent. According to the OED, insidious means “full of wiles or plots, lying in wait or seeking to entrap or ensnare...sly, treacherous, deceitful, underhand, artful, cunning,” and we see how all of Prufrock’s urban wanderings and interactions with other mutually reinforce this sense of entrapment. Prufrock’s substitution of his surroundings for answers to questions regarding his mental state puts into practice Eliot’s poetic mechanism of the objective correlativa. In addition, this pattern begs the question of if Prufrock is the product of his environment, or if his environment is ultimately narrated and only exists as the product of his deranged subjectivity.
Prufrock’s projections simultaneously dictate his relationship to his environment and stem from his interactions with the space and this pattern of co-dependency complicates any clear objective reality with a latent tension between personal experience and observable actuality. The narrator’s conceptions and interactions with space reveal his interior thoughts as we witness Eliot patterning expression as a process of exteriorizing the internal. Through a plot energized by the fluidity of time, Eliot utilizes non-linear narrativity as an essential path toward connecting the physical with the metaphysical in experience. Seeing time as fluid necessitates conceptualizing time as an overlapping and interweaving texture, full of sensation, desire, and movement. The complexity of interwoven sensory input becomes poetically transposed through Eliot’s anaphoric communications. As Eliot explicates, "when a poet’s mind is perfectly 63
equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 247). Eliot therefore seeks to emulate authentic experience as the sense of being continuously mirrored and represented by one's environment. Translating the thought process underlying identity formation through Prufrock's ontological quest, Eliot exposes the self as structured through reflections and external representations.
The gradations of drama and apathy present in the visions of adolescent Prufrock enable Eliot to work towards flexible verse that enables the reader to feel the narrator’s “thought as immediately as the odour of a rose” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 247). This process constitutes precisely what Eliot finds powerful in a metaphysical sensibility that can devour all experience. Eliot engages anaphoric and nuanced thought processes through his use of sensory collusions, such as sounds that seem like smells or visions that become described through physical sensations. For example, Prufrock calls the night a “patient etherised on a table,” and in this concise metaphor he transmutes a visual observation into a sensation of numbness (3).
The anaphoric referral to the night parallels the narrator’s own sensations, adding to the poem's dense atmosphere of overlaps and identifications with otherness by finding humanity expressed through inhuman images. Such connections destabilize assumptions of what it means to be human, engaging in dialogues of modern identity: what will become of the individual and of civilization in a modern urban world.
We cannot help but notice that the world of the poem exists solely as an extension of Prufrock’s endless self-referentiality. Prufrock's ambivalence largely stems from his acute awareness of temporal fluidity, of each moment spilling from the past into the future, and his identity as oozing into his past, present and future representations of himself. The way the narrator plays with time demonstrates his lack of respect for temporal boundaries and his own experience in a temporal netherworld between youth and 64
adulthood. Prufrock has no sense of needing to seize the day since, for him, the room “where women come and go ,” forever “talking of Michelangelo,” embodies a sense of the same scene repeating, the death spasm of some Arnoldian exploded universe (13 and 14). Prufrock compartmentalizes these women as sealed temporal anomaly that has always existed and will always exist in order to keep it separate from his own trajectory of forward moving existence; he therefore fantasizes about controlling his future by not going to this room of stasis and associates women with spaces tainted by the sequestered comforts of the past.
Society, and the intimacy of others, is thus represented as a segregated area Prufrock wishes to avoid for it is a trap that keeps one from moving forward. Prufrock therefore uses gender as a demarcation of a boundary, a room to which he begrudgingly must go, a distracting perfume that he wants to ignore, or the underwater maidens who will not answer. Clearly, not only is gender a boundary, it forms a boundary ridden with anxiety and crossing the threshold is never actually achieved. Prufrock never enters this room, never follows the perfume and never merges with the sea girls; his desires and fears are constantly deferred.
On another level, by juxtaposing his own aesthetic vision that looks outside to the modern urban setting, rather then into the classical canons of art appreciation, Prufrock positions his youthful, modern, masculine difference as exerting control and power over space and time. Eliot's choice of referring to
Michelangelo seems like a placeholder at first mention, representing any widely appreciated European artist and also a convenient rhyme with the word "go" (13). However, Michelangelo's most famous work,
"David," which is suggested by the artists name alone and we can surmise whatever statue on display might be reminiscent this glorified perfection of male form worshipped in marble. Part of Prufrock’s discomfort with the visit might actually be the overt sexual desire expressed by the women’s scopic ogling of a naked man, especially in contrast to Prufrock's own awkwardness with nudity and the human form. Perhaps
Michelangelo stands as a synecdoche for aesthetics that glorify classical beauty, specifically man’s muscular form and strength, which makes Prufrock feel inadequate and Eliot feel nothing. For Eliot’s interest lies in men’s flaws, insecurities and hesitations. Prufrock’s departure from the room marks Eliot’s 65
aesthetic departure from art appreciation and cultural paradigm that fantasizes unified identity. Like the narrator of "Conversation Galante," Prufrock pushes the romantic semblance and assumptions of art into another, feminized room which he enters only for the sake of enacting an exit, providing an objective correlative for his departure.
If these women are engaged in the present only through repetition of the past, Prufrock continually pushes into the future, even if only through macabre moments of fast-forward, utilizing the principle of metonymy to make any sense at all: “I have measured my life out in coffee spoons” (51). Yet these are not actual actions, just cinematographic images for the movie of his life he imagines. Prufrock seems weighed down by the burden of too much time; this weight in turn exacerbates his doubt, confusion, and inability to know exactly what to say, as he finds himself at the end of youth and the brink of maturity. A nearness to old age is approximated in the space of the poem through Prufrock’s metaphoric visioning connecting the present to the future. Through metonymic increments, such as the aforementioned spoons of coffee,
Prufrock shrinks the imagined space between youth and old age, metaphorically wrapping universe into a ball. Thus, Eliot uses metonymic displacements of metaphor in order to justify the juxtaposition of temporalities contained within authentic, everyday consciousness that cause the speaker to balk before an easy escape into romantic metaphoric approximations.
For example, Eliot does not express through metaphor that women stand as an alternate temporality embodying stasis, but instead he presents this experientially, as images cropping up in
Prufrock’s consciousness. Eliot's use of these other rooms and spaces where women exist to enact what literary critic and linguistic theorist Patricia Parker calls a “productive shift between far and near” (149).
Eliot depicts space that is presented as real and physical in order to speak to the sensation of boundaries and to embody space that is temporal. In order to give readers a sense of these moments as being Prufrock's real experience, Eliot utilizes metonymy, rather than bold metaphoric leaps that might suggest Romantic hyperbole or aesthetic melodrama. As "Prufrock" becomes increasingly allusive and the temporal stretches 66
become larger, the metonymic principle can no longer be sustained and artistic demands for metaphoric satisfaction usurp the narrative, pushing Prufrock to his necessary death as metaphor for the death of the
Romantic self. The larger metaphoric plot of the poem therefore concerns the nature of reality, which Eliot localizes as an apt point of inquiry into individual and cultural consciousness through the persona of
Prufrock.
In addition to ritualistically enacting departure from Romanticism and a new birth into Modernity through Prufrock's identity quest, Eliot also works to build meaning back into the language and experience of the dirty, everyday world that common people experienced, rather than some fantasy world artists imagine. Through insistence on the potential of metonymy to imbue the world with meaning and re- invigorate the mind with engagement in the present, I see Eliot working to overcome Victorian anxiety of simulacrum. The concept of simulacrum, which gained cultural traction in the 1800s, suggests false representations supplanting reality, of everything just being a false copy of some lost original, of objects lacking substance and of inadequate signifiers chasing the lost scent of a dead symbol. According to the
OED, the term “simulacra,” came into common usage during the mid-1800s through the works of a variety of writers and cultural pundits: philosopher Thomas Carlyle, novelist William Thackeray and art critic
John Ruskin. As the OED summarizes, “simulacra” is “something having merely the form or appearance of a certain thing, without possessing its substance or proper qualities” and as “a mere image, a specious imitation or likeness, o f something” this is “an artificial imitation.” These fears of imitation, inadequate representation and empty surfaces, dominated aesthetic criticism at the time of Eliot's birth in the Victorian
Era.
As Art Historian Linda Merrill indicates, art critic John Ruskin was a well-published Oxford Slade
Professor of Fine Art and respected as the British “arbitrator of taste," during the Victorian Era; Ruskin’s investment in the concept of simulacra thus attests to the prevalence of this paradigm as providing a meaningful approach to art and reality during the era (71). The concern with proper artistic representation 67
weighed heavily on Ruskin as a moral obligation to not deceive the viewer with an inadequate representation, but instead “recreation will be based on facts, not on formulas or illusions” (Clark, 133).
Ruskin s foundational text Modern Panters defines perfect taste as the capacity of receiving or enabling intellectual and moral pleasure from observing nature in its purity and perfection (200-204). By insisting upon objective vision of nature’s truth in art, Ruskin provides a critical backbone to the predominate strain of Romanticism in 19th century Britain. So if the world of Nature removed from human empiricism holds the only truth, then the modernizing urban world emerges as false fantasia. Thus, fantasizing that beneath the surface of false representation lies a deeper meaning, best mediated through Romantic contemplation of
Nature or realistic artistic expression of Nature, consequently makes personal experience unreliable and positions modern urban experience as incongruous to true meaning.
Eventually such an intractable depth becomes more real than its manifestation in the world and this burden of distance from, and longing for, this abstract original reality eventually cannot withstand the pull of the present and the changes in cultural needs. By positioning meaning outside of the ephemeral, surface world, the binary of simulacra could not contain the personal experience of a new generation of young adults who embraced the urban world as an authentic conduit to truth, for it fed so much into their day to day experience and the past world of Romantic contemplation of Nature became a dead language of irrelevant dreams. In response, Eliot’s ’’Prufrock" enacts a poem, or work of art, as an equalizing plane between subjective and objective reality, between images of nature and images of urban spaces, between the past and the future and ultimately seeks to redeem simulacra to meaning. In "Prufrock," simulacra is not defined by its absence of original veracity or its opposition to stable reality, rather, simulacra is released from a Victorian binary of reality and subsumed into a Modern dialectic of authenticity.
This modern dialogue of a multitude of realties cohabiting the space of the authentic attests to the sensation of a world becoming more and more complex; as Eliot writes “our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity...the poet must become more and more comprehensive” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 68
248). For example, when the subterranean world where Prufrock scuttles as isolated crab legs asserts itself and momentarily supplants the winding urban streets with the bottom of the sea floor, this analogous positions both as equally real, equally subjective and equally objective. This parallel between surface and depth is replicated at the conclusion of the poem, for we are not sure if Prufrock drowns on earth or at the bottom of the sea and furthermore not certain if this death is metaphoric or real. Everything that presents itself to Prufrock’s consciousness takes on this weight of reality, which is why he feels “spread out against the sky,” and shows us his mind as “if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on the screen;” thus, by visually and viscerally demonstrating the consciousness of an urban teenager laid bare, Eliot taps into the present moment of authentic modern experience (2 and 105).
Another crucial clue to seeing Eliot’s agenda as one of destabilizing assumptions of reality can be found in the dedication to his friend Jean Verdenal, which Eliot adds to the entire Prufrock and Other
Observations in 1917 (Mayer, 201-202). Eliot's dedicates to Verdenal several lines in Latin from Dante's
The Inferno, lines which he later translates in his 1929 essay on Dante: “‘now can you understand the quality of love that warms me towards you, so I forget our vanity and treat the shadows like the solid thing”
(“Dante,” 216). By treating the “shadows like the solid thing,” we can transcend the irreconcilable distance between fantasy and reality and we are no longer limited by a binary pattern, but rather see how both play upon consciousness so that both are real (Eliot, “Dante,” 216). Eliot met and became friends with medical student Verdenal during the year of 1910 while in Paris and the two explored the intellectual life of the city together and we can postulate that the two would have discussed the philosophical studies Eliot would have been engaged at this epoch (Bush). Eliot specifically became deeply invested in “Henri Bergson's philosophical interest in the progressive evolution of consciousness” (Bush). Later when Eliot returned to graduate studies at Harvard in the fall of 1911, he wrote his dissertation on the psychology of consciousness (Bush). Perl provides a few choice lines from Eliot’s graduate thesis on Bradley, wherein the 69
poet asserts, “reality cannot be build solely on fantasy or real material objects” (346). So, rather than a split between imagined reality and objective reality, or a separation between social reality and personal reality,
Eliot emphasizes the dialectic between the two as continuously recreating what is real (Perl, 346-348).
By reading "Prufrock" as emerging out of the milieu of Eliot’s 1910-1911 philosophical mindset, we can see that more than just creating an ambivalent atmosphere, the poet introduces a model wherein reader and speaker build the meaning of the poem, and the nature of reality itself, together. For, we as reader, immediately have to decide if we have been invited into the poem or not, so that we create the reality as one where Prufrock speaks to us, or he speaks to himself or to another person entirely. Ironically all these different realities exist in the poem and this trick further confuses any sense of clear divide between the world of the poem and our own world, putting into praxis Eliot’s poetic project of breaking down the barrier between the poet’s mind and the reader and between experiencing the art of poetry and the sensation of being in the everyday real world. As Eliot writes, experience forms from the “mush of literature and life” (qtd. in Nicholls, 55). In addition to the stimulus of philosophy of consciousness, cinema in the early twentieth century also provided Eliot new ways of seeing and an emerging art form problematizing aesthetics. Critic David Trotter reads Eliot’s early poems as utilizing cinematic metaphors of lights flickering on the screen; for example, Eliot couches Prufrock’s consciousness in cinematic terms as “spread out against the sky “as “if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on the screen” (2 and 105).
According to Trotter, in Eliot's letters he expresses interest in, “the emergence of...fully narrative cinema” that could absorb an “audience into a self-sufficient world unified across time and space;” in this bizarre dream like floating world of cinema stemming from reality, yet containing its own reality, Eliot found perhaps a sensibility capable of devouring all experience (242).
As Trotter’s essay points out, “there is sufficient scattered reference to the cinema, in Eliot’s letters, essays, and poems, to suggest an enduring preoccupation, and one of definite consequences 70
for his development as a writer” (237). The cinema’s most powerfully innovative narrative device, the montage, functions as condensed metonymy-cum-metaphor. As Trotter explains, montage for the most part
“came to be understood as referring either to the combination of two shots in such a way as to generate an effect or meaning not discernable in either shot alone, or to the sort of conceptual or rhythmical cutting”
(238). This conceptual and rhythmical cutting is very suggestive of contrasts and juxtaposition that Eliot characterizes as the central brilliance in the metaphysical poetry tradition (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 243).
Trotter calls our attention to Eliot’s discussion of montage technique in “The Metaphysical Poets” (238).
For instance, Eliot describes “some of Donne’s most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts: ‘A braclet of bright hair above the bone,’ where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations o f‘bright hair’ and o f‘bone.’ This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic....” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” 242-243). Eliot brings this same conceit of juxtaposition and a suggestively similar image to "Prufrock" in the image of “arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!”) (63-64). The process of zooming in, or changing perspective to illicit excitement of feeling, thought and sensation through contrast and tension within one image speaks to the complexity of viewership that translates into the terminology of modern film.
Through these modes of cinematic viewership, Eliot dramatizes the process of how our initial impression of an image becomes problematized through further examination and contrast, which visually manifests in a precise manner the way a multiplicity of realities form an authentic rendering of the truth. In the above example from "Prufrock," the movement to contrast arms that appear “bare” in the dark, but then parenthetically reveal the horror of “light brown hair” in the lamp light, emulates the process of a camera lens to zoom and dilate for emphasis with a film crew to further highlight this shocking discovery (63-64). 71
U ltimately, this is a means of translating the intractable authenticity of how we experience seeing and being in the world through artistic crystallization for heightened awareness of how consciousness operates. In this way, Eliot’s theoretical and poetic interest in the potential for authenticity through such a patterning of experience relates to the material culture of cinema. Eliot’s use of the techniques of Metaphysical poets such as catachresis, juxtaposition and telescopic visioning, makes perfect sense to Modern culture through the lens of cinema as an emergent popular art and entertainment form engendering a specific discourse around reality, viewership and aesthetic technique. The alignment between Eliot’s poetic techniques and a youthful, emerging art form, positions "Prufrock" as part of rebellious new forms of exploring consciousness and reality.
Trotter points out “the literature of the period and the cinema of the period can best be understood as constituting and constituted by parallel histories,” that is to say, as part of a dialogue regarding how to translate the world into poetry and how to adapt poetry to a modern sensibility (Trotter, 238). One powerful way of representing the world to itself as we experience the acceleration and accumulation of experiences in the modern city space is through cinema and the cinematic technique of visual story telling and condensed narration such as the above discussed montage. Trotter calls upon the critic Michael Wood to bolster his point “that the ‘principle of montage,’ together with the construction of imaginary space through the direction of the gaze,’ is ‘quintessentially modernist,’” and should thus be focused upon as the most compelling innovation in 1910s cinema (Trotter, 238). Thus Eliot incorporates this montage technique along with the possibilities of voyeurism and viewership in cinema into his conceit of consciousness as a dramatic space in "Prufrock," wherein projection enables the viewer to explore the functioning of consciousness and live vicariously through another’s experience. Trotter specifically sees “the fascination
[Eliot] felt for automatism” in the way Prufrock becomes forced to digress, distracted by sex impulses or 72
death wishes, a type of automatic or instinctual behavior that feels mechanical and uncontrollable, while objective camera voyeuristically captures these moments, exposing Prufrock’s loss of control (253).
As part of his fear of losing control or being beholden to another, Prufrock avoids female gaze entirely, more secure as a voyeur, than an object of attention. Prufrock acts like a voyeur in his own world and a spectator to his own identity and then Eliot intensifies this trope of viewership by adding the reader as a voyeur in Prufrock’s consciousness, emulating a cinematic apparatus for the exploration of viewership and consciousness. Cinema ultimately offers an artistic model for an all-consuming mechanism of sensibility and, for this reason, Eliot was interested in its terms, functions and aesthetics. As film theorists
Andre Bazin elaborates of the photographic image, “‘between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of the nonliving agent’” (qtd. in Trotter, 239). So most apropos to our discussion of Eliot’s poetics, cinema presented a mechanical device that could consume all experience and opened up creative space to explore consciousness and reality. Eliot’s found cinema fascinating for it
“‘gives an illusion not of the stage but of life itself” (qtd. in Trotter, 253). The potential to present the illusion of life as a narrative reality contained within a screen, yet extending to connect with the outside world through how this projection plays upon the consumer’s own consciousness, yielded exciting artistic results. Cinema, and cinematic imagination, opened up new frontiers for imagining our relationship to time, space, viewership, and identity. Cinematic narratives exploring interiority through external performance and visual footholds, or objective correlatives for states of feeling, provided a new, very modern medium, vocabulary and aesthetic for Eliot to calibrate to poetic expression.
Prufrock thus objectifies his identity so that he too, along with the reader, is a spectator to his identity. Prufrock must undergo an almost out-of-body experience in order to see and define himself through exteriorizing his identity into objects. Prufrock needs a mirror to see himself; so he tries to see himself in objects, mirrored in his surroundings, such as “the yellow fog,” “coffee spoons,” “lonely men in 73
shirt sleeves,” and “nerves in patterns on a screen” and though these metonymic connections Prufrock finds words for his isolation, alienation, lack of cohesive identity and longing for intimacy (15, 51, 72 and 105).
The pattern of the poem builds the deferred sensual, intellectual and emotional experience of the secular dream world of Prufrock. We grasp at slippages and multiplicities of representation and identity generated by unstable chronological order and this unstable chronological order is the bread and butter of Modernity.
For, as critic Timothy Mitchell explicates in Questions of Modernity, the conception of Modernity emerges as one where “present is not current experience,” but rather “a present displaced and replayed through the time lag of representation” (23). Specifically, Mitchell argues that modern identity forms “a space generated through representation and replication” (23). Like Marcel Duchamp's 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase,
No. 2, each moment in time creates another image or representation of self that the internal identity must then amalgamate, or disown, in conceptualizing itself. These multiple layers of separation from control over identity formation engenders a sensation of being trapped in layers of disembodiment and distance from identity and leads to anxious questions of ontology and reality.
To expand Miller’s argument, he reads the poem as an elaboration of a question of whether this is real or just a dream. As Miller elaborates, “past, present, and future are equally immediate, and Prufrock is paralyzed. Like one of Bradley's finite centers, he ‘is not in time,’ and ‘contains [his] own past and future’
(KE, 205). Memories, ironic echoes of earlier poetry, present sensations, anticipations of what he might do in the future... these are equally present. There is a systematic confusion of tenses and times in the poem, so that it is difficult to tell if certain images exist in past, present, future” (139-140). Miller’s focus on the chronological collusions is precisely why I read Prufrock as a teenager, for Prufrock’s identity is the objective correlative to the sensation of temporal anomaly. This disruption of linear chronology manifests
Prufrock’s unruly, unstable identity and fluid consciousness that contains all temporal senses. Attempting to defy the intractability of the present moment by juxtaposing and montaging time, Prufrock’s angst 74
translates into a fraught subjective psychic landscape that eclipses objective time: his consciousness replaces the clock.
Prufrock’s identity is one between youth and adulthood, and he seems to be having a crisis of what to do and how to act in order to not waste the present and the future. Miller essentializes Prufrock’s constant identity crisis as being demonstrated through his “unhappy relation to time and space” (139). In an interesting way, "Prufrock" displays time’s constant presence as an absence that the narrator seeks to define: an untouched past, an inaccessible present, and an untenable future. Miller ties time and space to movement as he raises a compelling point: “One of the puzzles of the poem is the question as to whether
Prufrock ever leaves his room” as "there is no way to distinguish between actual movement and imaginary movement” (139). Ultimately, there is no way to differentiate and there is no reason to, and the same goes for time; for, Prufrock’s representation of experience and identity overwhelms any objective reality. Thus, through the obsessive repetitions, patterns and anxieties regarding time and self, as excessive or deficient, we see a marked investment in time as a force that both gives meaning and structure to identity and, at the same time, denies it, as anything is possible. For example, consider “the evening is spread out against the sky,” could just be a darkness that Prufrock exudes or sees that covers up the actual daylight (2).
So, we see that Prufrock takes controls of time and self through articulation and representation.
Through his imagination he uses fast-forwards and pauses to answer his questions and satisfy his identity quest as a melancholic self-fulfilling prophecy. Essentially Prufrock is held captive to the creeping and inhibiting sensation that everything that might happen is foreknown, making any sense of free will or need to have an identity a delusion. Consequently, time cannot go fast or slow enough for the restless Prufrock, so he manipulates temporality through extremes of self-representation, either fast-forwarding himself to old age or wallowing in the bottom of the sea, losing himself in nothingness to escape the demands of the social world. In this way, Prufrock suggests that the same anxieties of appearance, apprehensions toward 75
intimacy, and routines of bachelorhood will haunt him in old age, thus finding excuses to not act through projecting common denominators of identity across age and time. "Prufrock" interrogates how our relationship to time shapes our identity and how identity is a product of our self-representation through time. Prufrock’s obsession with wasting time implies that he has plenty of time and feels crushed by the weight of what to do with it, yet his fixation on lost opportunities for intimacy indicates the present is already dictating the future so it is already too late.
Through producing a self-fulfilling pattern to anesthetize himself against the sting of rejection and the discomfort of failing to meet expectations, Prufrock expresses exhaustion at the thought of “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels,” thereby assuaging his anxieties around intimacy and fear of rejection by saying sex is so boring (6). Moments suggestive of intimacy or sexual tension frequently present themselves through references to women, who emerge as a catechism for all time and desire that Prufrock cannot control. He interprets the very presence of women as an aggressive act on their part to interrupt his narrative impetus and characterizes all their behavior and representation as dictated by their desire, not his.
Like the women who presumably flock to see the statue of presumably a naked man in "Prufrock" or get off on Chopin in "Portrait of a Lady," the woman walking down the street in "Prufrock" becomes "perfume from a dress," so that the smell of her desire to consume on a sexual and commercial level becomes writ large: a emergency broadcast interruption of Prufrock’s cerebral musings (65).
The lone woman out wandering in his urban space is all the more threatening, as he cannot quarantine her to a room, so Prufrock lashes out at the sight of arms in the lamplight. The horror of seeing creepy animal-like hair on delicate female arms repulses Prufrock before his initial arousal even finds an outlet; by fetishizing his own disgust, he deflects an inability to overcome his fear of losing control. Such images validate Prufrock’s sense of being ensnared in some horrible nightmare, constantly avoiding the trappings of intimacy and the sticky web of a feminized bourgeoisie society. As we briefly touched upon 76
earlier, through these images of extended arms or whiffs of fragrances, women appear in bits and pieces in
’’Prufrock." Many critics, such as Carol Christ, read this as symptomatic of Eliot’s misogynistic perspective
attempting to enact violence towards women through objectification and marginalization. Elaborating this
point, critic Melita Schaum interprets this misogyny as systemic to Eliot’s sense of cultural crisis, witnessed
in the assertion of the female as sexualized, commercial consumer and the subsequent fear of the female as
sexual aggressor, mate selector and purveyor of culture and taste. Just like the narrator of "Conversation
Galante" and "Prufrock," the narrator of "Portrait of a Lady," registers such concerns of feminine
aggression and sexually tainted musical taste with the “bloom,” being “rubbed,” in the concert room, which the narrator tries to cordon off in an attempt to forestall the encroaching sphere of female influence (12-13).
Furthermore, Eliot’s uses these female acts of sexually driven art consumption as an objective
correlative for his aversion to bourgeois cultural taste. The female gaze thus stands for this type of cultural
decline and suggests discomfort under the social pressure of gender and identity demands. For instance, the
narrator of "Portrait of a Lady" seeks to avoid this female gaze for it might entrap and debase him to
perform to the lady’s taste: “like a dancing bear” (111). In Eliot’s early poetry the female gaze sexually
stigmatizes and thereby defiles and debases through depraved desire anything it might gravitate to. Just as
in "Prufrock," under the pressure of a female gaze, the narrator of "Portrait of a Lady," projects an image of
his animal state as his response. As “a dancing bear,” caught up in a swirl of “bocks,” in a state of “tobacco trance,” the narrator implies that his female companion is pushing him to join her in consuming and
escaping in order to satisfy her sense of what a young, artistic experience should be: his identity becomes momentarily subsumed in her pathetic attempt to reclaim her long-lost “buried life” (111, 112-113 and 53).
The way Eliot collapses this lady’s sexual and artistic demands speaks to his concern of female gaze as a debasing presence, stuck looking to arouse some romantic conceit of the past to rekindle a sullied version of aesthetic pleasure. The way Prufrock sees women reflects his experience of their presence as a violation 77
more than it does an intentional or desired violence against their physical bodies. Christ concludes that
“these scattered body parts at once imply and evade a central encounter the speaker cannot bring himself to confront,” and we are left wondering what this encounter might be.
According to critic Michael North, this encounter is sex. North argues, "the horror of sex seems to come in part from its power to metonymize. Like Augustine, Eliot sees sex as the tyranny of one part of the body over the whole,” so that "sexual desire pulls the body apart, so that to give in to it is to suffer permanent dismemberment” (North). Prufrock’s senses threaten to pull his narrative apart when confronted with the sights and smells of the female other and then he becomes immediately repulsed by his desire and we are unsure precisely what these back and forth impulses mean. We cannot be sure if this performed repulsion references his sense of failure for being unable to eschew biological instinct, his experience of discomfort in the face of awakening sexual attractions or a grotesque curiosity regarding sexual desire.
Along these lines, Schaum draws our attention to the objectification of both female and male genders in the poem (343). This fragmentation of viewership and the dread of dispossession also therefore manifests the fragmentation of Prufrock's own identity, as he wishes to be a pair of scuttling claws.
In the movement of the poem, his interactions with others inform his self-perception, as he comes to perform identities that reflect how he experiences other people: as disembodied and synecdochic activities of self. Prufrock feels himself “formulated, sprawling on a pin,” suggesting that he has been reduced to a formula that can be examined and scrutinized (56). By definition, a formula is reducible to parts and predictable, like a set of numbers that puts in motion a certain end (“Formula,” OED). So to say he feels formulated means Prufrock can see his conclusion written in the very fibers of his being, such as the narrative of self-fulfilling prophecy we have discussed, and he thus suffers from a paranoia that he is transparent to someone else, himself, or to both. Ironically, Prufrock is transparent to the reader, as Eliot cannot resist adding every layer of irony possible to the poem. While Prufrock squirms uncomfortably, the 78
object of examination, we can imagine him blushing like a teenager under the “eyes that fix him,” possibly the eyes of a woman (56). The reason we could read this gaze as feminine stems from the section that
immediately follows wherein Prufrock undergoes a psychological examination, spewing out the “butt-ends
of his days and ways” in the form of expressing disgust at hair on women’s arms (60).
Caught in the web of presuming to know, Prufrock tries to flip the magnifying lens onto another,
but this ultimately functions as a projection of his own consciousness. Notice that the “butt-ends of his days
and ways,” are sensual memories of women, of their arms, hair, and smells metaphorically present as a
wasteful and disgusting reminders of his uncontrolled desire (60). Butt-ends of cigarettes refer to a life
wasted chasing an addiction, which connects to women as an intoxicating, yet toxic influence that distracts
in the next stanza. These lower impulses incite dread at the thought of exposure. Prufrock’s melancholic
imagination and self-portrayal as a passive victim expresses his impatience for resignation. Prufrock cannot
“force the moment to a crisis” fast enough (80). Prufrock’s unique relationship to time arises not from a
supernatural talent, but from sheer apathy and the cynicism of his teenage ego that seeks nocturnal
wanderings and philosophical musings to escape the demands and expectations of growing up or satisfying
the previous generation. Prufrock’s vision of his future self as a decrepit old man satisfies and justifies his
morbid fascination with wasted time.
VI. Publication and Reception: Contextual Atmosphere
“Twenty twenty twenty four hours to go I wanna be sedated Nothing to do, no where to go” (The Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated”).
As part of identifying how Eliot develops his own voice and poetics through the mechanism teenaged urban persona of Prufrock, let us look to the poem’s publication process and reception. “Prufrock” was completed in 1911, yet remained in a personal journal and only shared with close literary peers, such 79
as Conrad Aiken, until Aiken introduced the poems to influential critic Ezra Pound (Bush). Through Aiken,
Eliot met Pound in September 1914 and Pound began to champion his works (Moody, 52). At this point, as
Sultan clarifies, “Eliot and the few fellow-poets who knew and liked ‘Prufrock’ had failed to place it. Harold
Monro not only rejected it for Poetry and Drama, but according to Conrad Aiken, thought it ‘bordered on insanity’” (79). Pound anticipated that the “poem would ‘at once differentiate'" Eliot from other poets; for, as he wrote to editor Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine, Eliot had "actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own” (Pound qtd. in Sultan, 79 and Pound qtd. in Bush). As we have explored,
Eliot modernized himself through critical engagement with the recent poetics of the Victorians, French
Symbolists and the past precedent of the Metaphysical poets, as well as, the philosophy of consciousness and the aesthetics of the very Modern medium of cinema.
Poetry, a Magazine of Verse founded in 1912, pioneered the publication of newly emerging Modern verse and was considered to be the leading Modern literary journal and thus securing a place for Prufrock became a crucial project to Pound (Blair, 885-886). Though Poetry magazine prided itself on publishing modern works, Pound had to write an exhaustive series of letters “prodding the reluctant” Monroe, to print this poem that was “apparently too modern even for her” (Sultan, 78-79). According to Bush, Monroe disliked it [“Prufrock”] for its “overbearing sense of futility.” However, the perceived futility of the poem forms one of the qualities that Eliot develops as part of the overwhelming overabundance of time experienced by adolescent Prufrock. Pound finally persuaded Monroe to print the poem in June 1915, praising “Prufrock” to Monroe as “‘the best poem I have yet seen or had from an American’” (Whalan, 110).
Larger circulation of the poem came in 1917, when the Pound's own journal Egoist printed Prufrock and
Other Observations with the silent financial support of Ezra and Dorothy Pound (Bush).
At the time it first appears, Eliot’s poetry garners mixed responses from literary pundits; so as
Altieri suggests, “for Eliot’s initial impact we must place ourselves within the world of Victorian... poetry, 80
as if for the first time confronting the opening o f‘Prufrock’” (196). Most critical response to Eliot's collection of verse focuses on the titular poem “Prufrock” for, as Moody describes, “it gathers up the others written about the same time into a more developed and more fully resolved vision” (30). So let us turn to the immediate reception of the poem within the literary world by looking to a spectrum of critical responses from 1917 and 1918. From an anonymous review released just after publication in June of 1917, a critic writes, “Mr. Eliot's notion of poetry - he calls the 'observations' poems - seems to be a purely analytical treatment, verging sometimes on the catalogue, of personal relations and environments, uninspired by any glimpse beyond them” (Unsigned Review, Times Literary Supplement). This review draws our attention to the fact that Eliot absolutely frames his work as a different approach to writing and a different orientation to the function of poetry by entitling these poems “Observations,” which would immediately alert the reader to look at the poems differently and to focus on the imperative of the poems' visual imagery.
However, this above reviewer does not care to explore an alternative approach suggested by Eliot's title, primarily because he does not care for Eliot’s use of the poets' own urban environment as the site for the poetic. The review concludes with these biting remarks: “The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to any one - even to himself. They certainly have no relation to 'poetry,' and we only give an example because some of the pieces, he states, have appeared in a periodical which claims that word as its title” (Unsigned Review, Times Literary Supplement). Delightfully snarky, this reviewer actually taps into key components of Eliot’s modern departure from past poetry by mentioning Eliot’s use of his own urban environment and the absence of expected escape into a Romantic apprehension of nature or a resolution in Absolute truth. The review find no poetry in Eliot's study of consciousness or analytical and nuanced separation between speaker and poet. Thus, this reviewer considers Eliot’s work to transgress boundaries of what poetry should be.
Another anonymous negative response from July 15, 1917 sounds personally offended by Eliot’s 81
insubordination: “Mr. Eliot is one of those clever young men who find it amusing to pull the leg of a sober reviewer. We can imagine his saying to his friends: 'See me have a lark out of the old fogies who don't know a poem from a pea-shooter. I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”’ (Unsigned Review, Literary World). Significantly, this reviewer emphasizes Eliot’s youth in contrast to the critics' own old age and the presumed old age of his literary colleagues. The above review concludes by stating, “all beauty has in it an element of strangeness, but here the strangeness overbalances the beauty” (Unsigned Review, Literary World). According to the OED,
“strangeness” is “the quality of being strange, foreign, unfamiliar, uncommon, unusual.” Thus, “Prufrock” sounded so absurd to the critic that this precludes pleasure in the verse. In fact, the poem brought out the critics' own insecurities about being made into a mockery as the subject of a joke.
Just like our last sober reviewer, the zenith of negative reviewers comes in the form of one Mr.
Arthur Waugh, in a publication entitled Quarterly, wherein he scolds Eliot by admonishing the young poet for being a “drunken slave.” Perhaps Waugh is responding to the presence of anesthesia and alcohol in the works when he describes Eliot as drunk. Ezra Pound of course responds to this review, exclaiming “I shall call my next anthology 'Drunken Helots' if I can find a dozen poems written half so well as [‘Prufrock’]”
(Pound, “Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot”). Referencing this repartee, critic May Sinclair provides extremely helpful insight in her December of 1917 commentary, responding that she knows “that Mr. Waugh is simply keeping up the good old manly traditions of the Quarterly ’ (May, 10). Again, the old age of the literary world, in opposition to the youthful voice of the poet becomes the subtext of the reception and contributes to my reading of Prufrock as a teenager. While I do not follow these early responses which collapse the narrator and poet, the fact that these readings stress the youthful rebellion of Eliot the poet as representative of the poem, indicates that Prufrock’s voice was largely perceived as teenaged or young adult and not middle aged at the time of publication. In addition, Sinclair’s use of the word “manly” echoes my 82
discussion of the powerlessness of Prufrock’s masculine gender identity (10).
Thus, Sinclair suggests that both the youth of the writer or the youth embodied in the poem and the type of masculine identity presented in the poem would be in opposition to the “old manly traditions” of
Quarterly (10). While Sinclair attests that some of this back and forth feels like a “journalistic misadventure,” she asserts that “Mr. Eliot is dangerous,” as his “genius is in itself disturbing” (10-11). She writes, “he does not see anything between him and reality, he makes straight for the reality he sees; he cuts all corners and curves; and this type of directness of method is startling and upsetting to comfortable and respected people accustomed to going superfluously in and out of corners and carefully around curves”
(11). Sinclair thus senses that somehow Eliot accelerated the progression of poetics to more directly attack reality. Therefore, Sinclair explicates, critics who call him drunk or prefer the simplest poem in the collection, “Boston Evening Transcript,” do so because they do not understand what Eliot tries to develop and it is easier to reject it than to wrestle with the connotations of his verse.
She then goes on to assert that Eliot’s insistence upon reality and his use of “ugly” imagery “identify
Mr. Eliot with a modernist tendency” (11). Specifically in relation to Prufrock, Sinclair adds, that Eliot “is careful to present his street and his drawing room as they are, and Prufrock’s thoughts as they are: live thoughts, kicking, running about and jumping, nervily, in a live brain” (12). If Eliot read this review, he would most likely be pleased that, Sinclair incisively picks up on his effort to realistically portray consciousness. “Observe the method,” Sinclair instructs, “instead of writing round and round about
Prufrock, explaining that his tragedy is the tragedy of some submerged passion, Mr. Eliot simply removes the covering from Prufrock’s mind” and we see him “like an animal, hunted, tormented, terribly and poignantly alive” (13). She concludes her perceptive critique by eloquently reminding the reader: “it is nothing to the Quarterly... that Mr. Eliot should have done this thing. But it is a great deal to the few 83
people who care for poetry and insist that it should concern itself with reality” (13). Eliot thus immediately spoke to others, like Sinclair, equally invested in the pursuit of a new way to access reality and the phenomenology of consciousness.
In addition to the contested crossroads of Modernism and art and literature inhabited by “Prufrock” at the time, the poem also connects with a larger cultural discourse about masculinity and modernity by virtue of being published during World War I. As we have discussed, Eliot dedicates the 1917 publication of dedication to Verdenal, who died in War. While critic John T. Mayer is quick to point out that Eliot did this due to the quality of their friendship and did not include “the clarifier "mort aux Dardanelles" that would identify him as a victim of war,” until 1925, it is hard to imagine seeing a young man’s lifespan as
1889-1915 would not be evocative of the young male sacrifice of War (201-202). Whether this dedication is an intentional war time reference or not does not matter as much aw how it would have been perceived; so either inferred in 1917 or directly shown by 1925, in framing his poems with a dedication to fallen solider, Eliot’s connects his verse to a broader discourse of masculine suffering and Modern cultural disillusionment.
As his later poetry would demonstrate, Eliot feels compelled to write poetry that took into account the effects of World War II on Western civilization and the individual’s psyche, famously “The Wasteland” and “The Hollowmen.” “Prufrock” is of course not a war poem like these, for it was not written during or after War or about War directly, but it is hard not to image that with the War as a cultural backdrop, the poem made more sense to speak in such dark, morbid terms about Modern life. The 1917 publication, and the subsequent wider 1919 release, organically position the poem to speak to War related experience. In
Anthony Fletcher’s article, “Patriotism, the Great War and the Decline of Victorian Manliness,” he discusses the emergent idea of young male sacrifice and male as patient in the post-war world and both these cultural trends grant “Prufrock” yet another foothold into cultural consciousness. Fletcher explores the 84
way “Victorian manliness built upon Christian gentility and Social Darwinism” was put to the test and complicated by World War I (42). The Prufrock body likewise became a vessel for cultural investments in issues of masculinity, sexuality, youth and identity with the modern experience of the War and changing gender roles. The War thus became a catalyst for examining cultural shifts impacting gender identity; thus, published in a post-war context, Prufrock provided a potential means for readers to experience these concerns.
As Fletcher outlines, cultural concepts of manliness became contested during World War I with women taking over in the workplace and earning the right to vote, in other words the invasion of the female into male spaces, which finds consonance with spatially manifested gender concerns and the fear of female encroachment into male territories in “Prufrock.” With the actuality of war exposing male weakness and vulnerability and putting assumptions of male gender roles into question, Prufrock’s concerns seem less subjectively specific and neurotic and more of a broader cultural scope and mainstream concern. As
Fletcher writes, “Day by day, week by week, the manliness men had learnt in youth...was dented, chipped away, managed and jeopardized” (47). The image of etherized male patient would have had wider resonance and the awareness of mortality and fear of wasted youth would have been more prescient concerns during and after the war. With the war, as Fletcher summarizes, “a sea change of medical attitudes to the male psyche had begun;” in particular, the term “shell-shock” gave words to a war specific experience of male mental and physical weakness, which in turn, opened the door to a much larger cultural discussion of male anxiety and insecurity as endemic to Modern experience (Fletcher, 51).
The British “Royal Society of Medicine accepted in January of 1916, that it [shell shock] covered a series of nervous disorders, not all caused by proximity to shells, but with a solders loss of control of his nerves as the feature in common” (51). As a ripple effect, Fletcher summarizes, “the ideals of Victorian manhood [were] being successively clouded, undermined, overwhelmed and devastated, as solders 85
reinterpreted their youthful trench warfare” (60). Through letters, journals, memories and autobiographies of WWI soldiers, Fletcher demonstrates this process by which these servicemen “sought to reconstruct their identity by redefining their ideals of manliness with which they had grown up” in order to chart the shift cultural perception and experience of masculinity post-War (62). Along these lines, Mitchell discusses advances in nineteenth-century ushered in an unprecedented age of self-monitoring, self-diagnosis and self analysis both on a medical and psychological level that deeply impacted notions of modern masculine identity (17).
Thus, through the specific wartime context and the subsequent concentrated medical effort on the male patient, the male patient image alludes to an experience that would be specifically modern and viscerally evocative to Eliot’s contemporaries. Ether, for example, was a commonly used drug in surgeries at the time and the experience of the self as a monitored, helpless patient in the grip of a fever or anesthesia would likely strike a chord with readers. Another point to note is that trench warfare was described by solders through similar terms to those Prufrock uses, for example as Fletcher observes, “it was their enforced passivity under shellfire that men remembered most vividly, ‘You can do nothing but sit or stand or crouch... time seems to stand still,’ wrote Thomas Marks” (62). “Prufrock” thus becomes prophetically evocative of these war-related sensations of watching oneself and feeling out of control subjection and emasculation, as well as, the fugitive self and fantasy of escape, possibly through death.
Monroe’s criticism of the poem’s futility again emerges as perhaps part of the quality that seals the appeal of “Prufrock,” in prophetically mirroring the cultural atmosphere in 1917, where the futility of war, male as patient and the loss of young life would have spoken to war-time cultural Zeitgeists. Meaning is ultimately the combination of context and creation, so I think we cannot overlook the connections between the issues of the poem and the issues brought to the forefront of cultural consciousness during Word War I.
Seeing how the poem connects to larger narratives of masculinity and modern experience is crucial to 86
understanding the Modern nature of the poem, The narrator as a teenaged male growing up during a rapidly modernizing and urbanizing time and contributing to the afterlife of the poem.
VII. Prufrock’s Afterlife as Blueprint for Teenage Failure
“You should see how the women treat me Perhaps I should have the guts to see I’m a failure A teenage failure...” (Chad and Jeremy).
As we can thus see from the cultural context and immediate literary response to “Prufrock,” the poem provides a blueprint for youthful expression and engages a decisively Modern discourse regarding masculinity, identity and culture and how these forces rewrite the past, shape the present, and inform the future of young men in the rapidly changing world. The “Prufrock” prototype of masculine teenaged exposition forms a crucial cultural narrative and looking to the continued presence of this pattern helps us to explicate the poem’s continued appeal and inclusion in the classroom. As Soles, the educator I refer to at the opening of this paper, assumed no alternative to Prufrock as a middle-aged character, he did not encourage his students to explore potential connection between “Prufrock” and other modern narratives.
Soles instead asked his students give advice to this sad forty-year old Prufrock, which in effect pushes the persona to caricature; such an approach emerges as absolutely antithetical to my reading of Eliot presenting a study of young adult male consciousness in the Modern world.
In all my research on teaching “Prufrock,” I found only one study directly discussing teaching
“Prufrock” in terms of rebellious expressivity connected to teenaged culture; for in the apropos year of
1969, high school teacher David Morse publishes an article entitled “Avant-Rock in the Classroom,” where he realizes that rock and roll is here to stay by this point and that rock music in a way is a new form of poetry. Morse perceives that “the whole avant-rock movement clearly challenges the traditional notion of 87
what is literature, in much the same way that Elizabethan drama challenged earlier definitions of theater,” so he sets out to engage students who might otherwise fall asleep in class to explore the question of if
“traditional poetry [can] coexist with the new form” of rock in the English classroom (196-197). As Morse suggests, through its rebellious front, rock music embodies the tension between changing forms of verbal and written artistic expression and the desire to be relatable to the past, present and future. Ironically the friction between the modes of more visceral performed subversion and sometimes subtle subtextual longing for connection, energetically connect this new form to an existent larger cultural narrative evolving forms to speak to expanding and shifting consciousness of existence while still being relatable.
Not only did Morse realize that rock music “commands high interest” to his students by virtue of being framed in an aura of rebellion, newness and coolness, then by “listening to records at home, I discovered — as you will — parallels from my own store of poems,” and therefore perceived that part of the appeal of this new form of expression actually lay in its’ connection to the past (199). Morse's savvy approach sees rock music as an artistic recalibration of past patterns to fit the needs of a changing world.
He outlines his curriculum, writing “we began with human relations as a sort of touchstone, depicting love and the breakdown of love. Since this is almost the sole matter of the most popular Rock and Roll, it was easy to began appealing [to high school students];” Morse then specifies that he began with use of The
Doors song “Baby Light My Fire,” “interspaced with these were ‘To His Coy Mistress,’ ‘Lord Randall’ and
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (199-200). The Doors chart-topping 1967 song which Morse selects, features a male speaker appealing to an anonymous “girl” to “light the night on fire,” as “the time to hesitate is through / no time to wallow in the mire / try now we can only lose / and our love become a funeral pyre”
(The Doors). Morse's song selection tells a certain story of presumably young adult masculine expression, pleading with a young lady to accept his invitation to love and “Prufrock” expresses similar themes, and thus makes for a fruitful exercise in compare and contrast for Morse's pedagogical purposes. 88
The simple connections drawn through Morse’s high school level approach can be expanded into deeper parallels between the two works. While the tone of “Baby Light My Fire,” appears more confident and urgent, systematically avoiding “wallow[ing] in the mire,” with repeatedly insisting some nonsense about “lighting] the night on fire,” but importantly there is a mire one can wallow in and the image of love as a “funeral pyre” speaks to the death of something through its absence or failure (The Doors).
Significantly, there is a darkness lurking that the speaker of this song acknowledges, as he is currently in a state of not having love, hoping for an escape through this love he does not have and ultimately this love might just go up in flames like a horrible disaster. Ultimately, regardless of if the love is a success or a failure it will go up in flames, so that destruction and passion become intertwined in some twisted scene of sex-death wish fulfillment. The absence of realized desire and imagined destruction through consummation or extinction, evokes a sense of pointlessness that the speaker tries to deflect through repeatedly asserting the rapid passing of time to his presumed companion. Similarly, in “Prufrock,” time is an epicenter of narrative impetuous and interpretation, and thus, in both “Prufrock” and “Baby Light My Fire,” the narrator’s representation of time provides him a means of asserting control and generating meaning in a world of seemingly constant deferment.
Thus, just like Prufrock’s supposed love song, “Baby Light my Fire,” does not express being in love, but rather “depict[s] the breakdown of love,” drawing our attention to the vulnerability of the young male narrators in the face of desire and the subsequent images of wasted time, death and destruction he obsesses over to ease his sense of rejection (199). Morse’s pedagogical insights mirror my desire to push
“Prufrock,” into meaning through demonstrating how the poem develops a prototype of Modern masculine teenaged expression, which I think helps explicate the poem’s continued afterlife and provides a revitalized reading. Utilizing “Baby Light My Fire, "to effectively lower a rope into the past to guide his students to approach “Prufrock,” Morse touches upon issues of frustrated sexual impulses, apprehension of the 89
pressures of time and proclivity for images of aging, death and destruction to embody these feelings of
rebellion and teenaged feelings. By breaking down boundaries of expected behavior and expression, the teenager is the embodiment of Modern expression. To call on one last contemporaneous review of
“Prufrock,” in 1918 critic Edgar Jepson writes of the poem: “It is new in form, as all genuine poetry is new
in form; it is musical with a new music, and that without any straining after newness. The form and music
are a natural, integral part of the poet's amazingly fine presentation of his vision of the world. Could
anything be more United States, more of the soul of that modern land, than ‘Prufrock’” (428)? Thus, at the
time of publication, “Prufrock” provided a new love song, a new music for new frontiers of experience by
setting into motion a means of direct, authentic expression and use of adolescent experiences in the urban
world.
Jepson’s review also draws our attention to the lyricism of the poem itself; it does titularly claim to
be a love song after all and this point should not be overlooked. As Moody points out, Prufrock’s “attempt
to fit the elements of his world to his music creates a larger interest” (31-32). Not only does Eliot's narrator
attempt to transpose his world through positioning himself among the sounds of the city and away from the
Chopin in the concert room, Eliot himself asserts poetry as a mode of lyrical cultural expression. As I
quoted Eliot in my Introduction, the poet considers “the music of poetry, then, must be a music latent in the
common speech of the time” (“Music of Poetry,” 24). Emulating Baudelaire's mode of “release and
expression for men,” Eliot seeks to further develop a blueprint for modern masculine expression in poetry
and song (377). Drawing together the critical insights of Jepson, Moody and Morse with Eliot’s own
aesthetic assertions, I want conclude this paper by more fully exploring the poem’s afterlife in American
and British rock. We can find so many examples of songs speaking in shades of the Prufrockian precedent
for expression of teenaged consciousness, but I will isolate just a few to illustrate the afterlife.
To start expanding Morse’s curriculum, I want to first focus the way "Prufrock" stands for a 90
pattern of modern male experience of powerlessness in the face of unrealized or failed love. Turning to modern iterations of this prototype, consider Grinderman’s 2007 "No Pussy Blues." In this song, the speaker introduces his experience of self through a similar trope of exhaustion and disembodiment: “My face is finished, my body's gone” (Grinderman). Then the narrator describes facing “questioning eyes,” which push him collapse into himself and force him into a frantic, self-affirming mantra to try and survive the onslaught of these eyes: “I must above all things love myself (Grinderman). Yet then this narrator, just like Prufrock becomes distracted from this personal path of overcoming his fears by the possibility of easily escaping his crushing self-awareness and prison of subjectivity through intimacy with another. The narrator of Grinderman's song finds a pair of the eyes upon him and rushes to ask this girl out, but “she just didn't want to;” thus the female gaze makes him feel insecure and just reminds him of judgment and eventual rejection.
The narrator, like Prufrock tries on different modes of courtship and masculinity, stating “I combed the hairs across my head, I sucked in my gut and still she said, that she just didn't want to;” in other words, no matter how much he performs the masculinity he thinks she desires, she will not accept him
(Grinderman). The reason I initially thought of this song, is that the narrator mentions he even “read her
Eliot,” and she still has not wavered; so we leave the narrator suffering in a never-ending state of protracted desire, unrealized self and failed intimacy, drowning in a refrain of “no pussy blues” (Grinderman). The direct reference to Eliot speaks to the narrator trying to make sense of his experience by connecting to a larger narrative of troubled masculinity distracted from identity by the female gaze and the presence of a woman. In "No Pussy Blues," the narrator’s identity is destabilized by his unrealized desire in the most direct terms and while the persona is not necessarily teenaged, his identity crisis and the desire for escape from subjectivity through instinctual impulse in a sexually fraught atmosphere express certain subtextual tropes of Prufrock's identity formation journey. 91
Next, I want to focus on the connections of Prufrock's narrative to those of specifically teenaged persona in a striking iteration: Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.” This 1971 song speaks to the teenage years as a volatile temporal space and horrifying visions of old age; watching “lines form on my face and my hands,” exacerbates the narrator’s sensation of being beholden to the nightmare of temporal instability, as he cries out, “I'm in the middle the middle of life / I’m a boy and I'm a man" ("I'm Eighteen"). The line,
“I’ve got a baby's brain and an old man's heart,” paraphrases Prufrock’s conflicted identity as a teenager already disillusioned and unable to focus long enough on larger intellectual pursuits to arrive at a conclusion before being distracted by the world around him ("I'm Eighteen"). Alice Cooper's song replicates this Prufrockian consciousness of youth overwrought with the weight of an exhausting existence, wherein the only escape from this horrid future seems to be a protracted state of self-fulfilling doubt and hesitation interspersed with the distraction of potential immediate gratification. For both works, being a teenager appears characterized by uncertainty and entrapment, producing an overriding desire to escape.
Like Prufrock, Alice Cooper’s narrator “feels like I'm livin' in the middle of doubt," squirming uncomfortably in this temporally ambiguous space, which he physicalizes as a place: "Eighteen, I gotta get away / 1 gotta get outta this place." At this point of imagined departure, Alice Cooper's narrator, like
Prufrock, also fantasizes an inverted word, wherein “I'll go runnin' in outer space” serves as an updated sea floor upon which to scuttle away from the juggernaut of normative time. In both "Prufrock" and “I’m
Eighteen,” this fantastic escape becomes manifest as an evasion of normative human relationships with time. Either in space or as an animal, both narrators seek to redefine their identity through trying to change or control their relationship with time. The redefinition of self is an expression of teenaged identity crisis of not fitting into a category and rebelling against the inevitable categorization of being in terms of gender and age. Eliot's subversive engagement with reader at the beginning of his poem forms a hook replicated in another Alice Cooper song, "Welcome to My Nightmare," where the song is predicated upon drawing the listener into the speaker's consciousness. 92
While Prufrock’s invitation turns into an insidious inclusion in his nightmare, the narrative voice of "Welcome to My Nightmare," directly capitalizes upon the appeal of danger and subversion through expressing darker tones of authentic experience: “Welcome to my nightmare, I think you're gonna like it, I think you're gonna feel you belong. A nocturnal vacation, unnecessary sedation, you want to feel at home
'cause you belong." Thus, the narrators of both these Alice Cooper song push the Prufrock pattern to speak to teenaged experience as a shared experience, for as we saw from the few reviews which did see the value in "Prufrock," Eliot gives youthful Modernism a place, in the form of the space generated by artistic expression, to belong. As Haba observes," By looking again, and as far as possible, with fresh eyes, we may see that this poem ['Prufrock'], traditionally regarded as a portrait of alienation, in fact offers us a way out of alienation and into community" (54). Just as Eliot connected with the French Symbolists, his narrative relieves the burden of subjectivity, isolation and alienation through engendering a community of expressing authentic experience.
Consider lines from a more recent song, Public Image Ltd.’s 2012 “One Drop,” wherein the narrator engenders a rallying cry, embracing the disorder of teenaged experience:
We come from chaos, you cannot change us
Cannot explain us and that's what makes us
We are the ageless, we are teenagers
We are the focused out of the hopeless (Public Image Ltd).
These lines focus on the expressive quality of the teenager, as the pulse of Modernism and an exciting point of identity, and seek to build a community out of a shared experience of disorder, ineffability and desire to escape from the hopeless world of adults. Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady," sets up a similar contrast between the world of the Lady living a buried life and the young narrator, wherein teenaged experience stands for disruption and change for artistic vitalism and belonging to a new way of being in the Modern world. Thus, 93
by transforming alienation into community, Eliot provides a template for modern teenaged experience that is still very much alive today, particularly in rock music. By delving into the “unexplored resources of the unpoetical,” Eliot transformed modern urban experience into the site of the poetic through an all- encompassing teenaged sensibility of Prufrock, coming of age and speaking in modern, current language.
Eliot invites the reader into the poem showing that there is a value to the present shared experience of everyday life through the poetic technique of objective correlative and the assertion of metonymic builds toward meaning. Eliot writes a poem as a prototype for Modern masculine teenaged experience and reading
Prufrock as a middle aged man overlooks the significance of the cultural narrative of teenagehood that needed a face and form at the time the experience of coming of age in urban environs become more the norm than the exception. Eliot's teenaged persona of Prufrock demonstrates that through artistic engagement with the complications of Modern experience and temporal instability, you can give shape to identity and a form to all that you are feeling:
The time is too short but never too long
To reach ahead, to project the image
Which will in time become a concrete dream (Wire).
In conclusion, reading Prufrock as a teenager, rather than a middle-aged man, demonstrates how the poem crystallizes Eliot's early poetic and critical experience as a reader and a writer, responding to the past and looking to resonate with the future. In addition, this reading unlocks the afterlife of Prufrock as a rich site for critical and pedagogical engagement with the poem as a prototype for expressing adolescence and putting into motion a pattern that would captures a twentieth-century Zeitgeist: the teenager. For if we read
"Prufrock" as a concrete dream of a teenage wasteland, we can escape from the limitations of an interpretation that separates art and form; Eliot utilizes modern language, tone and imagery to speak to
Modern tropes of coming of age and investments in identity and age as contested spaces in a rapidly changing world. Prufrock ultimately forms the objective correlative to Eliot's poetic quest to energize 94
material and methods in order to express an authentic, vital narrative for Modern identity through the mechanism of the adolescent ability to consume all experience into a cohesive sensibility. 95
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