“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is the earliest of T. S. Eliot’s major works. It first appeared in the June 1915 issue of Poetry magazine, then it was later republished in Eliot’s chapbook of 1917, titled Prufrock and Other Observations. Drawing on the tradition of the dramatic monologue, the poem centers a well-educated but neurotic speaker whom we know only as J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock begins the poem by inviting an unspecified “you” on an evening stroll through the city. This “you” may well be a potential lover with whom he would like to “force the moment to its crisis” (line 80) by consummating their relationship sexually. As such, Prufrock is a modern version of the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” who is similarly intent on having sex with his paramour. Yet whereas Marvell’s silver-tongued speaker presents his mistress with a sustained and logical argument, Prufrock is indecisive and digressive, and he gets fixated on his own sexual frustration. Eliot uses many formal innovations to emphasize the discontinuity of Prufrock’s thoughts. Variable metrical and rhyme schemes, bits and pieces of sonnets, and the collage-like juxtaposition of fragmented images work together to assemble a vision of modernity’s existential bleakness.

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