Love Song to Prufrock

Originally this scene was going to be all in pencil, but I couldn't resist a little color.

I've decided not to organize this blog by days, but other than that everything will be the same. My goal is still to have 201 posts by the end of the year 2010.

Today in English class we are reading TS Eliot's "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock." The poem read merely for enjoyment is beautiful and provoking. Eliot has a wonderful way with concrete imagery. Some of my favorite lines:

"Like a patient etherised upon a table"
"sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells"
"The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes"
"as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen"

I love how a surprising description sits in my mouth like candy. For class, of course, our reading is more cerebral. Here are some of my notes:

"Prufrock" criticizes and confronts modernity. Although the poem's form is a dramatic monologue employing stream of consciousness, Eliot has modernized the dramatic monologue by concentrating on Prufrock's interiority, rather than the audience. It is unclear who Prufrock is addressing, but it could be an interior monologue.

In "Second Empire in Baudelaire," Benjamin explains how Baudelaire is a hero of modernity. The hero's task is to define or come to terms with modernity. However, Prufrock claims that he is not a hero; instead he is the Fool (from Shakespeare's plays). Prufrock wans to obtain the ideal - a woman - but the pleasantries of modernity (tea and cakes, petty criticisms of appearance) are distracting and get in the way.

Prufrock is frustrated with the modern individual. He views the world as beauty with little substance ("sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells"). Instead, he wishes to be a crab, the scavenger who finds beauty in trash. This is similar to Baudelaire, who finds beauty in ugliness and is able to both praise and criticize it. However, Prufrock is stuck in limbo between two worlds - modern life, where his desires (the woman and aesthetic) exist but he is unable to move to get them and the world in which he is able to move, but is old and ugly.

Read entire poem here.