T.S. Eliot

Wednesday, we spent the entire class period discussing T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Students shared their insights on the particular section they were assigned. Keeley mentioned that the inclusion of Michelangelo was significant, given his famous statue David, held to be a symbol of youth and beauty, a projection of the human ideal. This stands in contrast to J. Alfred Prufrock, a middle-aged man who describes himself as "Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse" (119). We also spoke of Eliot's use of simile ("Streets that follow like a tedious argument" (8)) and of repetition, the latter reflecting the mundane nature of life as well as Prufrock's belief that "There will be time." We mentioned too, that this poem falls in the modernist tradition, one that both looks back (to Homer's Odysseus in the final lines, for example) and forward, in an attempt to reflect the ever-changing world.