The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Matt Butcher
English 640
April 19, 2005

The Reason for Open Verse in Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

In the early twentieth-century, poets strove for the improvisation of poetic forms while still regarding the classical structures. In What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-garde by Daniel Kane, he holds that there are certain characteristics among contemporary avant-garde poets: “blending of high and low language, blurring of lines between prose and poetry, enthusiastic use of humor, [and an] employment of collage techniques...” (Hertzler). Most of these are prevalent in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, one of the forerunners of this avant-garde poetry.

One of the reasons that Eliot chose Open Verse in this poem is that the speaker, a neurotic yet eloquent man, as indicated by the highbrow name he writes in the title, is educated enough to know of the poetry forms but is emotionally stifled enough to never use them properly. First of all, he quotes from Dante's Inferno in the epigraph to the poem, which translates as the speaker addressing his ideal audience.

If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would
ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further
movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf,
if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy (Lozano).

Simply quoting this shows his aristocratic, gentlemanly demeanor, yet in it the speaker acknowledges the fact that there is no such sympathetic figure. So he goes about it with only himself as the audience for the rest of the poem. That's where the avant-garde characteristics begin to merge together. With no discernible audience, he can hop from one form to another.

The blending of high and low language is subtle yet prevalent in such instances as the first few lines when he says “spread out” and “etherized” in the same sentence. He describes “butt-ends” of cigarettes yet uses the complex image of himself as being analyzed like an insect collection if he is “pinned and wriggling on the wall.” He refers to complicated understandings of world culture in several places, like Hamlet, Michelangelo, Lazarus, John the Baptist, as well as the epigraph's Inferno. He refers to them though in very simple terms, for instance: “In the room the women come and go, /Talking of Michelangelo.”

The blurring of prose and poetry is done through the poem's use of dramatic monologue. The rhyming tends to keep a coherence to the poem that free verse would have made depressing. By the speaker trying to use poetic rhyme and meter, there is a sense of hope for humanity and its art in the poem. And when there is the stray line, it only stresses the important line more. In one stanza, there is an abbbcccc and then the phrase that cuts to the bone, “Do I dare /disturb the universe?” followed by a poetic twisting of words with “In a minute there is time /For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

There are many instances of an enthusiastic use of humor. “I grow old . . .I grow old . . ./I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Even with the depressing weight of age, something he thinks about with a heavy sigh twice, he still sees the humor in the dress of the more aged, something that he is slowly becoming. He needs this humor to face the stark reality.

The most avant-garde aspect to this poem is its fragmentation of poetic forms as a way to employ a sort of collage of poetry. There are fragments to the form of the sonnet. The last three stanzas in particular are rhymed and styled as a Petrarchan sonnet, yet there is a single line interjection that connotes the real dread of the poem. “I do not think that they [mermaids] will sing to me.” The use of the refrain “In the room the women come and go, /Talking of Michelangelo” hearkens back to earlier poetic conventions in the ballad. This fragmentation speaks of Prufrock's mind and the society that he struggles against. Eliot's image of the crab links to this fragmentation. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws /Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” This scavenger image brings to mind how Eliot wishes to fuse the pieces of past poetic form to new contemporary poetry.

Works cited:

Lozano, Amy.