Is J. Alfred Prufrock insecure?

-- Liz :x (lizd4ply...), April 28th, 2005.

Maybe he's a bit alienated, but he's mainly paralyzed by indecision. Though I do think he has a certain amount of contempt for the chatter about Michaelangelo, but part of that also comes out of fear of coming across well at these social gatherings.

Here's THE answer:

Prufrock is such a power lover that his lay ends up "like a patient etherized upon a table" (notice the similie: like). He likes taking his women to "one night cheap hotels", because of all the sawdust. His manhood is so unbelievable that he often hears the question "what is it?", but he prefers to get down to fucking, "let us make our visit".

Prufrock is also quite prolific, and he's not averse to group sex and pissing action: "In the room the women come and go". In fact, the women consider him an artist, they are "Talking of Michelangelo".

I'll let you discuss this angle with your TA. I'm sure you'll manage to convince him/ her. Come back if you want more.

HAHAHA I only just got this.

It was then that either he or one of his women bit off his penis. I am now inclined to believe that he emasculated himself, but that he subsequently regrets his action: "Then how should I begin | To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?" After healing, he is of course left "With a bald spot in the middle of my hair".

We totally get this pome!

The poem begins with a quote from Dante, seemingly illustrative of Prufrock's address to the reader (which forms the text of Eliot's poem). In Dante, the statement is made by a damned soul, who answers a question only because he believes that his listener can never return to Earth to give away the answer, which he wishes to keep secret. This seemingly places Prufrock in the position of one who speaks out from the gulf of some abyss, addressing arcane matters not to be shared with those on Earth. In so doing, he implies something about the reader as well as about the speaker. Should it perhaps be recalled, however, that the damned soul in Dante, quoted at the beginning of Prufrock, was sent to hell for the sin of false, deceitful, and treacherous counselling?

The indecisive Prufrock seems to be trying to decide whether to continue climbing the stair, or to turn back. There might also be an element of Dante here, as well. The suggestion that he has "known them all before" (the evenings, afternoons, and mornings of his life) should perhaps be taken literally. He is not living on Earth, but is reliving, in some sense, elements of his life elsewhere, though "elsewhere" needn't be taken literally as indicative of physical place. Shall he continue this phantom existence, with its odd corruptions (e.g., the arm which seems at first fair and feminine but which reveals a hirsute defect when viewed under the lamp), or shall he address the "overwhelming question" and thereby "disturb the universe"? (The phrase "disturb the universe" should certainly be taken literally.) Yet throughout, he remains coy, skirting this question (much less its answer!). He does not return from the dead to advise the living (q.v. the story of Dives and Lazarus), but instead employs obscure metaphors suggestive (falsely?) of concealed meanings and mysteries. But perhaps he has decided that nobody would believe him, "though he rose from the dead".

Mark Adkins
msadkins04@yahoo.com

Mark Adkins
msadkins04@yahoo.com

The ontology is what the poem is about, and thus is obviously what makes it.

Mark Adkins
msadkins04@yahoo.com

Mark Adkins
msadkins04@yahoo.com

That is much more present in the poem than a few tossed off allusions to Dante.

I'm not sure this is so "obvious." Prufrock was written in 1917. According to various articles I'm finding on the net, body hair removal didn't become popular among women until the 1920s. So it's hard to understand why the narrator would be disgusted by a little arm hair (not to mention that it could have a subtle sexual undertone) -- also, the word "downed" sounds pleasant enough to me.

I too always connected the peach with the downy-arms. I have personal associations with the peach thing, too: I have this massive fruit-phobia that really takes shames with peaches. So Archel, I love that you put "risk" on the peach-association list, because that's 90% of what I get out of them -- they're so rarely ideally ripe, and when they're not, they're quite disgusting, and so biting into one is a huge gamble of pleasant possibilities vs. grainy or mushy or god-forbid wormy ... So it's always made sense to me on some intuitive level that it'd be a peach. Peaches are a big leap.

I mean, alternately, it could be an Allman Brothers reference.

Mark Adkins
msadkins04@yahoo.com

In a recent interview, noted contemporary poet David Berman claims that TS Eliot's seminal modernist poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is the "Stairway to Heaven" of twentieth century. In fact, the ontological intention behind the poem could be nothing further from this assessment. While Berman's rockist assertion aligns Prufrock with the more or less progressive rock band Led Zeppelin, Eliot instead meant his poem to stand as orphic warning about the evils of progressive rock. Eliot offers Prufrock as a prophetic allegory of the aging prog rock movement whose increasingly banal self-regard betrays the moral bankruptcy of their chief appeal: arrogant virtuosity. In this article I demostrate that Eliot's elliptical lines forecast the minimalism of punk even as Prufrock himself is autopsized as a somnambulent dinosaur prog rock corpse.

In a recent interview, noted contemporary poet David Berman claims that TS Eliot's seminal modernist poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is the "Stairway to Heaven" of twentieth century American poetry. In fact, the ontological intention behind the poem could be nothing further from this assessment. While Berman's rockist assertion aligns Prufrock with the more or less progressive rock band Led Zeppelin, Eliot instead meant his poem to stand as orphic warning about the evils of progressive rock. Eliot offers Prufrock as a prophetic allegory of the aging prog rock movement whose increasingly banal self-regard betrays the moral bankruptcy of their chief appeal: arrogant virtuosity. In this article I demostrate that Eliot's elliptical lines forecast the minimalism of punk even as Prufrock himself is autopsized as a somnambulent dinosaur prog rock corpse.

I think, like others above, that this is only one (probably 'wrong') interpretation. To me the exclamation mark is revelation, not dismay. And yes, nabisco, I totally associate the peach with the fuzz of arm hair too. It's not so much a defect as something that is always there but not always revealed, it's the exciting and tactile reality/corporality as opposed to the mere surface.