Creative Works

I was first introduced to the poetry of T.S. Eliot when a Scottish girlfriend gave me a paperback copy of his ‘Selected Poems’ (Eliot, 1954) for my birthday. I was immediately attracted to the poems in this small collection. One poem in particular caught my interest and imagination. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (aka ‘Prufrock’) was not like anything I had read before. It was disjointed, complex and difficult to fathom. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it. Why? What was it about this poem that I found, continue to find, so appealing? Certainly, I was mightily impressed with the scholarship; the imagery; the references to English and European literature; the skillful juxtaposition of the classical with the day-to-day; the original use of rhyme, rhythm and repetition. All this and more. But first and foremost, it was the enjoyment that reading Prufrock gave me. It spoke to me in a new way.

Eliot’s comments on the poetry reader’s need for both enjoyment and meaning are pertinent. It is possible, he writes in his 1929 essay on Dante, indeed necessary, for ‘some direct shock of poetic intensity’ to be produced in a reader who may yet remain uncertain of the work’s meaning (Ellis, 2009). While he asks us to be mindful of the need to understand the meaning of a poem, he also reminds us that ‘it is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship’ (Eliot, 1951).

As I read and write more, I am keen to understand how and why poets develop their narrative voice. I remember being surprised to discover that Eliot was only in his early twenties when he wrote Prufrock. He later revealed that he had begun writing the poem while he was a student of philosophy at Harvard University in 1909 -10, later completing it while travelling round Europe. In my naivete I could not understand how someone so young could get inside the head of an older man suggested by the narrative. When he was questioned about the Prufrock persona he said: ‘It was partly a dramatic creation of a man of about 40 I should say, and partly an expression of feeling of my own through this dim imaginary figure’, (Perry, 2016).

Though this monologue is highly original, it does have its antecedent influences. Of all the poets of the Victorian period, Eliot once remarked, ‘the only one whom our contemporary can study with much profit is Browning’ (Perry, 2016), who was famous for writing dramatic monologues in the voices of assumed persona. But Eliot’s poem is not like a Browning monologue. The opening rhyming lines may flatter to deceive us into thinking this is a late Romantic poem, but the next line of the stanza scotches this assumption. The simile of ‘a patient etherised upon a table’ is the first ‘direct shock of poetic intensity’ that jolts us awake to the poet’s intention to lead us away from Romanticism towards a new poetic experience. The images are not ethereal echoes of a Wordsworthian cityscape viewed from Westminster Bridge, but are arguably the sights and sounds of a red-light district, implied by the poet’s careful choice of ‘certain’ and ‘one-night’ in ‘certain half-deserted streets’ and ‘one-night cheap hotels.’

By inventing persona, poets find a way of articulating something about themselves. Eliot’s influence is evident in my early attempts at creating a persona. My first monologue was based on memories of Blackpool, the seaside town where I was born and raised. The seedy images were trawled up from the time I spent as a teenager selling kiss-me-quick hats on The Golden Mile. My persona carries faint echoes of Prufrock’s introspection. But to paraphrase Prufrock, I am not T. S. Eliot, nor was meant to be. Nevertheless, I have to be aware of any tendency to reproduce poetic imagery and devices from other people’s poems, especially Eliot’s.

Prufrock starts with direction but goes nowhere. The polite directive of the trochee, ‘Let us go’, that opens and closes the first stanza, is not followed up with any forward motion. Like the yellow fog that cat-like moves languorously around the back streets of the city, the poem curls round and round with its drifting, self-interrupting sentences repeatedly putting off the full-stop moment. The appearance of some unidentified women draws our attention to the poem’s interrupted movement, as well as to Prufrock’s preoccupation with these mysterious females, ‘who come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo’. This rhyming couplet introduces a pause in Prufrock’s stream of consciousness before the poem feigns to move on again.

It pauses again with the second appearance of the women before taking us inside Prufrock’s head and to the repeating question: ‘Do I dare?’ which he first asks in relation to the external world, the ‘stair’. Then switches self-consciously to his physical appearance, his ‘hair’. The end rhymes lock us into a repetitious cycle of self-questioning that leads us ever deeper into his confused and confusing inner world. The poet interrupts the flow again by parenthesising Prufrock’s projections. With the repeating ‘They will say’ he second-guesses what the women are saying about him.

The stanza ends with the ultimate question: ‘Do I dare/Disturb the universe?’, to be immediately followed by yet another two-line interruption, but not a rhyming couplet. To guard against familiarity and to break the flow, Eliot moves the goalposts again and inserts two non-rhyming lines, the first one short and the second a longer line with an internal rhyme, ‘decisions’, and ‘revisions’. The repetitions continue with the opening lines of stanzas eight, nine and ten: ‘For I have known’, and ‘And I have known’. After another interruptive two-liner in which Prufrock imagines himself as a crab, the monologue shifts gear again. It shuffles back and forth between real objects in the café – tea, cakes, ices, marmalade, teacups – and Prufrock’s daydreaming about all manner of things, sexual and religious.

From one question to the next, from the outer to the inner world, from the particular to the universal the movement is circular not linear like time. A whirlpool of strange imaginings swirls round in Prufrock’s mind. He tells us who he is not, not John the Baptist or Prince Hamlet, but not who he is because he is does not know: ‘That is not it at all/ That is not what I meant, at all.’ A man in search of himself, he is suffering from the paralysis of self-analysis. The questions that he repeatedly asks himself are not rhetorical, they are the questions of a perplexed personality. Every repetition, every circular motion, reminds us that the poem and its persona are going nowhere. The important message for me as an aspiring poet is that Eliot does not say as much. He does not tell us; he allows the poem’s carefully chosen images, rhymes, repetitions and structured pauses to show us.

Prufrock has no regular rhyme or rhythmical patterning: it is written in free verse which, according to Eliot, involves abandoning the ‘comforting echo of rhyme’. In Prufrock he does not dispense with rhyme altogether, just regular rhyme in a set scheme. ‘There are often’ he explains, ‘passages in an unrhymed poem where rhyme is wanted for some special effect, for a sudden tightening-up, for a cumulative insistence, or for an abrupt change of mood.’ (Perry, 2016) The come-and-go couplet already mentioned is one example of the poet using rhyme to produce a mood change. The rhyming lines, ‘Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?’ in stanza twelve is another example. Possibly there is a guilt feeling associated with the sexual act hidden in these two lines Not only do they signpost a change from sexual to religious imagery, they also point up a key element in Eliot’s poetry. Whereas it is an acutely self-conscious ‘I’ indicated in the first line, in the second line it is the impersonal moment that is forced to its crisis.

This begs the question about the role of the personal in poetry. Eliot responds with an unambiguous answer in what he calls ‘The Impersonal Theory of Poetry’ in which he states that the poet ‘submerges his own personality, his own feelings and experiences into the personality and feelings of the subject of his poetry.’ He likens the mind of the poet to a piece of platinum that catalyzes a chemical reaction, a reaction which cannot take place without the catalyst being present. Just as a catalyst remains unaffected by the reaction it causes the mind of the poet remains unaffected during his poetic composition, (Eliot, 1920).

In stark contrast to the aptly named confessional poets, Sylvia Plath being a prime example, Eliot can say with conviction that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. It is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. For what it’s worth I would say my writing falls somewhere in between the personal and the impersonal.

References

Eliot, T.S. (1954), “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Selected Poems: T.S. Eliot,
Faber and Faber Ltd, pp. 11-16.
Ellis, S. (2009), “T.S. Eliot A Guide for the Perplexed”, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, p. 2.
Eliot, T.S. (1951), Selected Essays, 3^rd ed., Faber and Faber, London.
Perry. S (2016), ‘A close reading of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”’, Discovery Literature: 20^th Century, British Library. Available at (add link)
Eliot, T. S. (1920) "Tradition and Individual Talent”, The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, London.