The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: A Poem about Prufrock's Movements toward Poetic Maturity and Creativity

Abstract

This paper represents a new approach to studying T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It is an attempt to explore the poem's theme by establishing connections among its parts, as well as by identifying similarities between Prufrock and the other characters mentioned in the poem. The poem features a lot of familiar social activities, with lines and phrases that are repeated and in which one can see elements of the main ideas of the poem. There is a dialectical relation between poetic creativity and everyday social activities. This study differs from previous attempts to understand it as principally a poem about loneliness and man's modern crisis, or a poem about eroticism, by focusing on finding differences between Prufrock and the other characters in the poem. This fresh interpretation proves that the poem is concerned with Prufrock's movements toward poetic creativity and maturity, with Eliot's desire to be a poet being camouflaged within Prufrock's character. The poem also tackles the problem of the insufficiency of language as a tool of expression. Yet, the end of the poem shows that Prufrock succeeds in crossing the threshold to the sea of imagination and creativity.