“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot

Part I: Eliot among the Modernists

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is one of the most famous poems in English. It’s one of the first encounters readers have with modern poetry. It may have even invented modern poetry—along perhaps with experiments Gertrude Stein, another graduate of Harvard, was attempting at the same time. In 1914, upon reading the poem after having been handed it by the poet himself, Ezra Pound, confirming his hunch about the reticent poet recently arrived in London, wrote to Poetry magazine’s founding editor Harriet Monroe, “I was jolly well right about Eliot. He has sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American. PRAY GOD IT BE NOT A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS.”

The poem is energetic, experimental, and strange. Its energies are ironic because they originate in a figure bemusedly and morbidly observing the life that is passing him by. Its experimentalism, drawn in part from an ingenious channeling of the spirit of the French Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue (1860–1887), credited with originating vers libre (“free verse,” in French) in his work, was so successful, becoming the model for countless poems to follow, that it’s easy to overlook how experimental a poem it is (and how successful). Its strangeness, composed of pairs of contrary tensions—for instance, lyric language and plain; vibrancy and emasculation; surrealism and ordinariness; satirical description and earnestness—is one of its enduring traits.

Throughout his twenties, T.S. Eliot kept with him a notebook in which he wrote out drafts of the poems he was experimenting with. This notebook, which he called “Inventions of the March Hare,” contains a completed draft of a poem titled “Prufrock among the Women.” In 1936, describing the poem to literature professor Eudo C. Mason, Eliot wrote, “J. Alfred Prufrock was written in 1911, but parts of it date from the preceding year. Most of it was written in the summer of 1911 when I was in Munich.” Eliot graduated from Harvard in 1910; in 1911, he was preparing to return to pursue a doctorate in philosophy. He was 22 years old.

By the time “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in Poetry in 1915, Eliot was already nostalgic for the time when he wrote the poem. In a letter to his friend Conrad Aiken in September 1914, he wrote “The devil of it is that I have done nothing good since J.A.P. and writhe in impotence.” (An ironic thing to say about a poem whose speaker is an impotent middle-aged bachelor-prophet.) Two years later, in September 1916, he wrote to his older brother Henry, “I often feel J.A.P. is a swan song, but I never mention the fact because Vivien is so exceedingly anxious that I shall equal it, and would be bitterly disappointed if I do not.” Vivien was Eliot’s wife. 

Once published, “Prufrock” established Eliot and made his career in poetry possible. This despite some editorial haggling with Aiken, who successfully advised Eliot to cut thirty-eight lines of a middle section titled “Prufrock’s Pervigilium” (an obscure word for keeping watch through the night—hinting at Eliot’s mental state while he drafted the poem). And likewise with Pound and Monroe, who found the Hamlet stanza (beginning at line 111) unnecessary, and who unsuccessfully advised him to cut it. After its appearance in Poetry, it was republished in Catholic Anthology 1914–1915, edited by Pound, and then as the title poem in Eliot’s groundbreaking first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, published by The Egoist in 1917, the publication of which Pound also arranged. (And Pound would go on to arrange as well for the publication of “The Waste Land.”) Eliot never forgot this debt. In 1958, he wrote of Pound, “It was owing to his efforts that poems of mine were first published and but for his encouragement I might at an early period have abandoned the writing of poetry altogether.”

These words provide a valuable entryway into Eliot’s poem. When he first drafted the poem, he was not necessarily intent on becoming a poet. He was studying to become a philosopher (and a professor) after all. But something in the poem—something about its inventiveness and cadences, for instance—compelled him that it was worthwhile enough a work that in London in 1914, upon meeting Pound, who already had a considerable reputation, he would summon the temerity to share his work. The poem launched his career. Granted, it didn’t launch like a rocket—it would take the 500 copies of Prufrock five years to sell—but the poem confirmed him as a poet, opening all the doors, even if it took some time for it to happen.

Part II: Prufrock, the poem and the man

The poem begins, “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table”—where we are stopped short. (Are we still? We certainly should be. Also, fun fact: Eliot’s poem was the model for “Dark Star” by The Grateful Dead: “Shall we go, you and I while we can / Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?”) “Prufrock’s” first line is in the same meter and cadence as William Blake’s “The Tyger” as well as the incantations of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters in Macbeth, especially “Double, double toil and trouble:” trochaic tetrameter—it’s the meter of magical invocation, by which we enter by habit and cadence into the world of the imagination. The meter of the second line is more variable; it has four feet like the first, but two loose anapests followed by two iambs. Line 3 gives us four feet once again but even more varied than line 2—a loose anapest, a dactyl, an iamb and another, but with a feminine syllable at the end.

Despite their variation, it’s not the metrical expressions that stop us short but that anesthetic word in the center of the third line: etherised. The opening two lines offer jaunty prospect and a first glimpse of something inviting—the evening spreading out. But: etherised. Ether is a very light, volatile, and flammable fluid produced by the replacement of the hydrogen of organic acids by alcohol radicals. It is a powerful anesthetic. To etherize is to anesthetize someone. It’s a clinical term, one of experience, which Eliot knew from reading William James’s Principles of Psychology, in which James describes the visionary properties of ether intoxication (which the psychologist himself experimented with). 

That the sky is like a patient laid out on a table receiving anesthesia etherizes Eliot’s readers into the weird and playful vision of his poem. All the lines of the poem’s opening stanza rhyme but for two—the etherized line 3 and line 10, which concludes the stanza, “To lead you to an overwhelming question …” The line drops us into two memorable sing-song couplets, one of which serves as something of a refrain in the poem:

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

Michelangelo is not the first proper name we encounter in the poem. That recognition belongs to J. Alfred Prufrock, who seems to be the speaker of the poem, and whose love song this poem must be.

So, who is Prufrock? Eliot himself was rather dismissive about his subject, writing in 1962, “I chose the name because it sounded to me very very prosaic.” Fair enough. But Prufrock’s was the name of a furniture dealer in St. Louis that sold such things as student chairs, intended to be used at home for doing homework, and that advertised its wares in the magazine of the private school Eliot attended as a boy when he was growing up there. William Prufrock was the German émigré who established William Prufrock Furniture Company. (Another fun fact: The Prufrocks lived just east of beautiful Tower Grove Park on Tennessee Avenue, around the block from Louisiana Avenue where poet Devin Johnston has been living for almost a quarter century.) 

Mostly, the name suggests something of the ambience of the poem—this is the love song of a St. Louis burgher (or someone like him somewhere else), a seller of bourgeois furniture, and the words of the poem are thoughts rolling through his head as he walks to work or perhaps comes home from it. And the words from Dante’s Inferno that serve as the poem’s epigraph reinforce a sense of quiet despair. They report Guido da Montefeltro’s response to Dante the Pilgrim asking him who he is, to which he says, “If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.” Guido is a soul being punished for being an evil counselor; because he believes Dante is also a tormented soul, he agrees to tell the truth with no fear that whatever he might say will be repeated in the world of the living. This means less that Prufrock is in Hell than that because he doesn’t believe anyone will hear what he has to say, he is speaking truthfully, without fear of infamy. There’s some irony here, of course, in that Eliot includes the lines from the Inferno without either attribution or translation. The poem begins in obscurity.

Part III: Prufrock, claims and questions

    In the room the women come and go
    Talking of Michelangelo.

The poem continues mostly as a complaint but told in rollicking irregular rhythms and rhymes. Prufrock recounts worries about growing bald, tedious-sounding afternoons of cups and cakes, and the enduring fatigue of the “butt-ends of my days and ways,” repeatedly asking doubtful questions, wondering, “Do I dare?” or whether he has “the strength to force the moment to its crisis” or whether he should part his hair behind. “Do I dare to eat a peach?” he asks near the end of the poem, one of my favorite questions in all of literature.

Prufrock invokes Michelangelo, as noted, and also compares himself in the negative to John the Baptist—“I am no prophet”—and Hamlet—“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” He even compares himself to Lazarus, “‘come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—.” These lines sound the notes of the apocalyptic tone that echoes anxiously through the poem. They resolve with indelible lines of an undercutting self-critique, “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all,” as iconic to early Modernism as “I found it hard. It’s hard to find. / Oh well, whatever, nevermind” would be to Gen X eight decades later.

I mentioned already “Prufrock’s Pervigilium,” 32 lines in the first draft of the poem which are reduced to three lines and to which in revision Eliot added two mysterious further lines:

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I also already mentioned that pervigilium is an antique word for night-watch; that is, for the act of remaining watchful through the night. It suggests crisis—and a mood of quiet crisis pervades the poem to be sure—but it also suggests something of the act of vigilantly attending to the dreams and visions that come in the night.

Visions of narrow streets at night enervate the poem, beginning in the fourth stanza when, like a cat,

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

No amount of the observation of cats—and I have observed a lot of cats for extended periods of time (“And indeed there will be time”)—prepares you for the proprioceptive, kinesthetic rightness of comparing the yellow nighttime fog to a cat, so ordinary and so visionary at once. (It’s common to mistake this for London fog, but Eliot is depicting a Midwestern fog in St. Louis. Keep in mind he drafted the poem in Munich and was three years from settling in London.)

The same thing, in a more compressed fashion, happens in the two lines appended to the edited pervigilium—“I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”—in which Prufrock makes an even more mysterious, post-diluvian comparison, where a crablike motion alerts us to the oceanic feeling whose pressure might crush the lines of the poem into deeper crisis.

The vision of these lines feeds into the magnificent apocalypse that concludes the poem:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

The peach yields to the song of the mermaids, the supernatural sea. (A final fun fact: Eliot was Duane Allman’s favorite poet. The Allman Brothers Band’s third studio album was called “Eat a Peach.”) But Prufrock’s heightened hearing and vision is not enough to overcome his paralyzing doubt:

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

It’s a vision of inundation, being swept under the tide. What Prufrock sees is so vivid, the white hair of the waves blown back, the sea-girls wreathed with seaweed. And the concluding prospect is so haunting—Till human voices wake us, and we drown—an expectation as well as a surrender. George Oppen was haunted by the final phrase, working it with slight adjustment into the title and conclusion of the final poem in his last published book, Primitive, “Till Other Voices Wake Us,” in which the poet reflects in part on his origins (Brooklyn instead of St. Louis), hearing “a music more powerful // than music // till other voices wake / us or we drown,” eliminating Eliot’s comma and making the crucial substitution of or for and. For Eliot, there’s no way to avoid drowning in your past.

Part IV: Chain reaction

There is nothing like the explosion of poetic power that was Modernism in the history of literature in English. “Prufrock” was like a spark that lit the fuse, showing other poets what would be possible in this new age. Can the drama and the originality of the achievement of this poetry that Eliot summoned to life in “Prufrock” still be properly reckoned? Perhaps an analogy will help.

In 1932, Leó Szílard, the Hungarian physicist and visionary of the atomic age, was walking the streets of London pondering a problem. He was 34 years old. The problem was how to unleash the energy latent in the atom, which other scientists of the day declared to be “moonshine,” impossible because of various perceived inefficiencies deemed insurmountable. But Szílard was inspired to solve the problem because as a teenager in Budapest he had read a novel of H.G. Wells titled The World Set Free, published in 1914 but set in the 1950s, when Germany, aided by “atomic bombs” (Wells coined the phrase), destroyed cities in air raids in its effort at conquest. Wells spectacularly if inaccurately visualized these bombs’ “blazing continual explosion[s]” in such a way that Szílard’s imagination caught fire at the time and continued to burn with the conviction that the atom could be split and its energy released. Standing on a London street corner, having taken a walk to clear his mind, so the story goes, Szílard suddenly envisioned the bombardment of the nucleus of an atom with uncharged relatively slow-moving neutrons (all previous hypotheses imagined bombardments of rapidly-moving and challenging-to-harness charged electrons), setting off what he believed would be a chain reaction.

It would take a decade before Enrico Fermi would successfully initiate the first self-sustained chain reaction under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942. But it was Szílard’s inspiration on the London street corner that started the blaze that became the atomic age.

Modernism in English is replete with titanic figures, among them Pound, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Stein, Crane, H.D., and of course Eliot. “Prufrock” is to Modernism what Szílard’s visualization of the chain reaction is to the atomic age. It’s that insightful, that enormous in its influence. “I have heard the mermaids singing.” What a poem!