The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Written by one of the most prominent figures of modernism, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” defined the early movement. Characterized by a break with previous generations’ romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, modernist poetry often made use of free verse, collage, dense cultural allusions, vernacular language, and other experimental poetic elements. Emerging in the wake of World War I with the onslaught of new technologies and modes of communication, modernism often espoused a profoundly negative or pessimistic view of the contemporary world, rejecting the notion of a stable, loving, or ordered world in favor of something depersonalized and amoral with unstable values and a lack of human connection.

Eliot believed that no poet could escape the influence of past writers and artists—an idea he explicates further in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” With “Prufrock,” Eliot situates his poem in a long literary tradition, stretching from the Bible to Dante—who he invokes from the beginning of the poem—to Shakespeare, and to Robert Browning, who also wrote a great deal of dramatic monologues. The richness of reference and allusion establishes not only Eliot’s connection with English literary tradition, but sets the stage for him to break with it, creating a poem that was unlike anything that had come before.