Critically examine the postmodern poem of the greatest inventive genius of twentieth century poetry, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is substantially pontificated by the readings of Grover Smith’s discovery of Henry James’s story Crapy Cornelia about a chivalrous heroic charismatic personae in nostalgic temperament for being fallen in love despite polarized worlds. To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all———Should say: “That is not what I meant, at all. That is not it, at all.”
Verbosity of Polonius oriented Prufrock is cast in the image of Hamlet like dilemma upon the portentous questions touched by the magical boudoir of Lazarus comments upon the appealing picture of plight; despite baroque verbal embroidery of the afterthought along with the women come and go telling of Michelangelo marred by the deterrent of wondered fogg in the moorings of “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”
Prufrock’s deluded and diseased existentialist psychosexual spirituality reanimates after all the captivity of brooding alienation in the salvation from the redemptive quest towards security and non vulnerability. Mermaids are thought to be elusive and mystic fantastic beasts as byproducts of Eliotic phantasmic escapism. This solitude of the phantasmagoria world, shuffling memories and repressed desires ultimately pioneers ship wreckage of humanity. Harsh voices and harsh laughter of the women summoned upon the Prufrockian spirit from the shadowed archways and diabolical gothic apartments; along with drunkards reeling by chattering and cursing like monstrous beasts and grotesque children in awaital by the doorsteps and heard shrieks and oaths from the gloomy courts.
Whatmore is interesting of these mermaids fantasy is the imaginary wanderlust of Prufrock’s metaphysical asylum from being “pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas” Furthermore textual genesis of Prufrockian spirit in metaphorical and rhetorical language exists as the new art emotion as well as the patient corpse—-the body post operative and post catalysis of sulfurous acid since emotional experience undergoes transmutation and transformation following depersonality of split consciousness and dissolving towards climactic dissolution of poetic personality/selfhood.
Nonetheless textual frustration and gender performativity of this dramatic monologue investigates heterosexual desire and heterosexual intercourse through colloquial euphemism as implied by “Let us make our visit”. Moreover, biblically the Hebrew double entendre of know implicates masculinized libidinal object of male gaze through the sexual encounter. “I know the voices dying with a dying fall” implicates the lovesickness of Twelfth Night Orsino and in this case, Prufrock masculine desire for the eroticization of the feminine corporeality. Orgasm of dying little death echoes masculine heterosexual desire; yet the insidious intent of orgasm happens spatially in the “farther room”.
Further Reading
“Till Human Voices Wake Us and We Drown”: Community in the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, James C. Haba [Glassboro State College] , Modern Language Association, Spring 1997, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 53-61, Modern Language Association
Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, November 1957, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 71-72, National Council of Teachers of English
The Textual Genesis of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Catalyzing Prufrock, Nicholas B. Mayer [University of Oxford], Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 34, No. 3, Spring 2011, pp. 182-198, Indiana University Press.
Textual Frustration: The Sonnet and Gender Performance in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Brian Clifton [University of North Texas], Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 42, No. 1. Fall 2008, pp. 65-76, Indiana University Press.
Prufrock and Other Observations: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, B.C. Southam, A Harvest Original Publication.