Prufrock and Other Poems

Concerning the previous class, I am still struck with the imperiousness of Eliot, Pound, and Hulme. Their championing of their burgeoning movement goes above and beyond the call of mere pretense. Hulme’s assault on the Romantics has such fervor that I must question his motives. Was he so married to their innovations that he, in the spirit of true chauvinism, lashed out against the old with such disdain? Eliot and Pound had easy, simple excuses for their attacks on Romanticism; they wanted the money. Their quest for pay gave them a profit motive for their assault on their poetic forefathers. Eliot, in his quest to become both a great poet and a great critic, staked his ego on his form. Thus, their reasons are clear.

I must say, had those words come from Eliot or Pound, I might have given them greater weight. Of Hulme, All I may say is this: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

In regarding these early works of Eliot, one can easily identify the three themes that Torrens enumerated in his essay, namely ego, surrender and sacrifice, and offering oneself to common action. One might also add the tension between masculine and feminine, especially in regard to the masculine craving for the feminine, though, to my mind, part of that might fall under the aegis of the aforementioned three themes.

Take, for example, “La Figlia Che Piange,” or, translated, The Girl Who Weeps. Eliot paints a picture of love and loss where the speaker grasps the strands of memory – both that which was and that which was not. The speaker poses the girl and her lover (presumably himself) in the twin realities of quiet departure and ardor-filled rupture. It hearkens to the notion of the author being able to warp the subject to his will – and the speaker, in experimenting with his memory, being able to manipulate the loss of his beloved into something greater, more heroic. Thus, the woman of the poem becomes more of a pawn of his ego – a doll in the house of his mind. He gives her up, but in doing so, he gains the ability to endlessly recreate the moment of their breakup.

The four “Preludes” lend more to the notion of “common action.” Indeed, the primary matter involves four phases of the common day. Filth dominates the piece. The city life is one of small people doing common things, each leading to the next. This stands in stark contrast to the clean, refined domesticity found in “Portrait of a Lady,” where the routine of study of the drinking of tea seems like a trap as great as the urban squalor portrayed in “Preludes.” Here one can also draw parallels with “La Figlia” in that the interaction with the female character presses against the masculine, and the world of the mind is able to suppress the effect.

The blockbuster of the selected poems, however, is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Eliot’s narrator quests about the city in a domestic odyssey, experiencing the mundane as exalted novelty. There is a certain epic quality to this odyssey as Prufrock ventures further into squalor – almost as if he is a stranger in this strange land just outside his own door. Likewise, one gets a sense of the ego in Prufrock’s self-consciousness, be it his musing about his physical defects (his bald spot or lanky frame) or the profound sense of isolation he projects. The women, be they speaking of Michelangelo or selling their bodies (as in the cut section) do not seem individuals in his life but alien beings. Indeed, even the mermaids at the end serve only as harbingers of self-destruction.

Perhaps “Love Song” is the ultimate poem of ego. Prufrock has locked himself so deeply in his mind that all things become abstractions. Domestic is foreign. People become apparitions. Discovery becomes suffocation.