Brief Summary of Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot Essay Example

suggest other meanings.

Another American poet is T S Eliot. Through his poetry he wanted to portray the fragile psychological state of humanity in the twentieth century. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” demonstrates this sense of indecisive paralysis as the speaker wonders whether he should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, or if he has the fortitude to keep living, Readers eavesdrop on J.

Alfred's stream of consciousness, which flows forward, backward, and sideways as musings trigger other associations not logically but psychologically . Prufrock's fears are first brought up at the beginning of the poem. he unpleasantness of that image immediately makes the reader aware that this will not be a conventional love poem. On the contrary, the reader can see that the idea of going to meet this woman makes Prufrock feel as helpless as an etherized surgery patient. Prufrock” displays important characteristics of Eliot’s early poetry.

It is strongly influenced by the French Symbolists. From the Symbolists, Eliot takes his sensuous language and eye for unnerving or anti-aesthetic detail that contributes to the overall beauty of the poem. The Symbolists, too, privileged the same kind of individual Eliot creates with Prufrock: the moody, urban, isolated-yet-sensitive thinker. However, whereas the Symbolists would have been more likely to make their speaker himself a poet or artist, Eliot chooses to make Prufrock an unacknowledged poet, a sort of artist for the common man.

Another characteristic of the poem is its use of fragmentation and juxtaposition. Eliot sustained his interest in fragmentation and its applications throughout his career, and his use

of the technique changes in important ways across his body of work: Here, the subjects undergoing fragmentation (and reassembly) are mental focus and certain sets of imagery; in The Waste Land, it is modern culture that splinters; in the Four Quartets we find the fragments of attempted philosophical systems?