Week 5: Literary Terms (etc.) for T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

     

Eliot as painted by Wyndham Lewis, who Eliot described as "the most fascinating personality of our time." Read about Wyndham Lewis here.

Click here to read the poem; click here to listen to Eliot reading the poem. Click here for an excellent annotated version of the poem from the Genius website (formerly Rap Genius). Here is Dorian Lynskey's article on Eliot and popular music.

Literary Terms

(1) from Margaret Drabble's Oxford Companion to English Literature, fifth edition, 1985:

Modernism: an omnibus term for a number of tendencies in the arts which were prominent in the first half of the 20th cent.; in English literature it is particularly associated with the writings of T. S. Eliot, Pound, Joyce, V. Woolf, W. B. Yeats, F. M. Ford, and Conrad. Broadly, Modernism reflects the impact upon literature of the psychology of Freud and the anthropology of Sir J. Frazer, as expressed in The Golden Bough (1890-1915). A sense of cultural relativism is pervasive in much modernist writing, as is an awareness of the irrational and the workings of the unconscious mind. Technically it was marked by a persistent experimentalism; it is "the tradition of the new," in Harold Rosenberg's phrase. It rejected the traditional (Victorian and Edwardian) framework of narrative, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose, in favour of a stream-of-consciousness presentation of personality, a dependence on the poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic communication, and upon myth as a characteristic structural principle. Modernist literature is a literature of discontinuity, both historically, being based upon a sharp rejection of the procedures and values of the immediate past, to which it adopts an adversary stance; and aesthetically. Although so diverse in its manifestation, it was recognized as representing, as H. Read wrote (Art Now, 1933), "an abrupt break with all tradition . . . The aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned." Modernist works (for instance, the poetry of Eliot and Pound) may have to the unfamiliar reader a tendency to dissolve into chaos of sharp atomistic impressions, and some critics (e.g. Ortega y Gasset) have deplored their drift towards what he describes as "dehumanization," away from the "human, all too human elements predominant in romantic and naturalistic production."

(2) from M. H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed., 1999:

Dramatic Monologue: a monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person. In a play, when a character utters a monologue that expresses his or her private thoughts, it is called a soliloquy. Dramatic monologue, however, does not designate a component in a play, but a type of lyric poem* that was perfected by Robert Browning. In its fullest form, as represented in Browning's "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "Andrea del Sarto," and many other poems, the dramatic monologue has the following features: (1) A single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment: the Duke is negotiating with an emissary for a second wife; the Bishop lies dying; Andrea once more attempts wistfully to believe his wife's lies. (2) This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker. (3) The main principle controlling the poet's formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker's temperament and character.

In monologues such as "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" and "Caliban upon Setebos," Browning omits the second feature, the presence of a silent auditor; but features (1) and (3) are the necessary conditions of a dramatic monologue. The third feature -- the focus on self-revelation -- serves to distinguish a dramatic monologue from its near relation, the dramatic lyric, which is also a monologue uttered in an identifiable situation at a dramatic moment. John Donne's "The Canonization" and "The Flea" (1613), for example, are dramatic lyrics that lack only one feature of the dramatic monologue: the focus of interest is primarily on the speaker's elaborately ingenious argument, rather than on the character he inadvertently reveals in the course of arguing. And although Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) is spoken by one person to a silent auditor (his sister) in a specific situation at a significant moment in his life, it is not a dramatic monologue proper, both because we are invited to identify the speaker with the poet himself, and because the organizing principle and focus of interest is not the revelation of the speaker's distinctive temperament, but the evolution of his observations, memories, and thoughts toward the resolution of an emotional problem.

Tennyson wrote "Ulysses" (1842) and other dramatic monologues, and the form has been used by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other poets of this century. The best-known modern instance is T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915).

*Lyric: In the most common use of the term, a lyric is any fairly short poem consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought and feeling. Many lyric speakers are represented as musing in solitude. [...] In the original Greek, "lyric" signified a song rendered to the accompaniment of a lyre. In some current usages, lyric still remains the sense of a poem written to be set to music; the hymn for example, is a lyric on a religious subject that is intended to be sung. The adjectival form "lyrical" is sometimes applied to an expressive, song-like passage in a narrative poem [or any other work of art].

(3) from J. A. Cuddon's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed., 1999:

persona: (Latin "mask")  Originally a mask or false face of clay or bark worn by actors.  From it derives the term dramatis personae and, later, the word person.  In literary and critical jargon persona has come to denote the "person" (the "I" of an "alter ego") who speaks in a poem or novel or other form of literature.  For instance, the narrator of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the speaker in Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, the different speakers in Browning's dramatic monologues, the Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels, Marlow in Conrad's Heart of Darknessand other stories by him.  

(4) from J. A. Cuddon's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed., 1999:

allusion: Usually an implicit reference, perhaps to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event. It is often a kind of appeal to a reader to share some experience with the writer. An allusion may enrich the work by association and give it depth. When using allusions a writer tends to assume an established literary tradition and an ability on the part of the audience to "pick up" the reference. The following kinds may be roughly distinguished: (a) a reference to events and people (e.g. there are a number in Dryden's and Pope's satires); (b) reference to facts about the author himself (e.g. Shakespeare's puns on Will; Donne's pun on Donne, Anne and Undone); (c) a metaphorical allusion (there are many examples in T. S. Eliot's work); (d) an imitative allusion (e.g. Johnson's to Juvenal in London).

Below: Kanye West's "Touch The Sky" (2006) features a brief but densely allusive guest verse from Lupe Fiasco: 

Yes, yes, yes, guess who's on third?

Lupe steal like Lupin the Third
Hear like ear till I'm beer on the curb
Peach fuzz buzz but beard on the verge
Let's slow it down like we're on the syrup
Bottle-shaped body like Mrs. Butterworth
But before you say another word
I'm back on the block like I'm laying on the street
I'm tryin' to stop lion like I'm Mumm-Ra
But I'm not lyin' when I'm laying on the beat
Engarde, touché, Lupe cool as the unthawed
But I still feel possessed as a gun charge
To come as correct as a porn star
In a fresh pair of steps and my best foreign car
So I represent the first
Now let me end my verse right where the horns are like . . .