The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay & Criticism

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Critical Overview

According to Vincent Miller, "By 1914 the age of the heroic achiever was over. That was... the truth   [this] love song pinned down in a startlingly new and creative way for an entire generation." Indeed, American poet John Berryman declares that "Modernist poetry begins" in the simile "like a patient etherised upon a table." He recognizes, however, that even the title manifests a decidedly Modernist "split" in its juxtaposition of the full romance of the term "love song" against such a highly formalized name as J. Alfred Prufrock. This is a technique Eliot discovered in reading the French Symbolist poets Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire. He declared that his early free verse was "more 'verse' than 'free,'" adopting Laforgue's practice of "regularly rhyming lines of irregular length, with the rhyme coming in irregular places." This creates the music of 'The Love Song of 1. Alfred Prufrock," and inspired American...
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