Student Essay on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

An analysis of T.S Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with regard to Eliot's use of Modernist techniques. Eliot's use of these techniques, including fragmentation, symbolism, and allusion, enable the reader to see Eliot's embrace of Modernist thinking and to gain insight into the ideas that formed the basis of Modernism.

The "Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S Eliot is key evidence of Eliot's interest in the ideas and techniques that defined the Modernist period. Eliot's uses poetic language to not only deliver, but accentuate the various ideas, beliefs and features of writing that were characteristic of the Modernist era.

Paul Gannon acknowledges that "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" is not a love song in the traditional sense, but a statement of the dire straits of modern society'(1). The reader delves into the mind of a middle-aged, solitary, balding man who is struck by his incapability of expressing himself in his social environment. In the form of an interior monologue, the speaker in Prufrock, laments over his inability to 'force the moment into its crisis' with the women around him but contemporaneously knows too.....