SOURCE: “Romance of Self Doubt,” in Yeats-Eliot Review, Vol. 13, No. 1-2, Summer, 1994, pp. 1-6.

In the following essay, Levy views “Prufrock” as an examination of individual insecurities.

As Donald Childs has pointed out, the central concern of most interpretations of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has been “the notorious distinction between the ‘you and I’” invoked at the beginning of the poem:¹ “let us go then, you and I. …”² While some critics argue that the “you” is external and refers to an anonymous companion’³ or the author,⁴ or even the reader,⁵ more approach the poem as the expression of an internal conflict between two parts of Prufrock's self. In the most common formulation, the poles of this conflict are defined by the dichotomy between Prufrock's private emotional needs and the inhibition concerning their public expression. Joyce Meeks Jones, for example, cogently emphasizes the conflict between “… the...