Prufrock 2017

Biographical

Hints of Eliot in Prufrock

Perhaps never again did Eliot find an epigraph quite so happily suited to his use as the
passage from the inferno which sets the underlying serious tone for Prufrock and conveys more
than one level of its meaning: “S’io credesse che mia pisposta …,” lines in which Guido da
Montefeltro consents to tell his story to Dante only because he believes that none ever returns
to the world of the living from his depth. One in Hell can bear to expose his shame only to
another of the damned, Prufrock speaks to, will be understood only by, other Prufrocks (the
“you and I” of the opening, perhaps), and I imagine the epigraph also hints, Elliot himself is
speaking to those who know this kind of Hell. The poem, I need hardly to say, is not in a literal
sense autobiographical: for one thing, though it is clear that Prufrock will never marry, the
poem was published in the year of Eliot’s own first marriage. Nevertheless, friends who knew
the young Elliot almost all describe him, retrospectively but convincingly, in Prufrockian terms;
and Elliot himself once said of dramatic monologue in general that what we normally hear in it
“is the voice of the poet, who has put on the costume and make-up either of some historical
character, or of one out of fiction.” … I suppose it to be one of the many indirect clues to his
own poetry planted with evident deliberation throughout his prose. “What every poet starts
from,” he also once said, “is his own emotions,” and, writing of Dante, he asserted that the Vita
nuova “could only have been written around a personal experience,” a statement that, under
the circumstances, must be equally applicable to Prufrock; Prufrock was Eliot, though Eliot was
much more than Prufrock. We miss the whole tone of the poem, however, if we read it as
social satire only. Eliot was not either the dedicated apostle in theory, or the great exemplar in
practice, of complete “depersonalization” in poetry that one influential early essay of his for a
time led readers to suppose.

Schneider, Elisabeth. “Prufrock and After: The Theme of Change”. PMLA (Oct. 1972) Vol.
87(5):1103-1118.

The “Overwhelming Question” for Prufrock

Most critics … have seen the overwhelming question related to sex… They have
implicitly assumed and given their readers to understand – that Prufrock’s is the male’s basic
question: Can I?
Delmore Schwartz once said that “J. Alfred Prufrock is unable to make love to women of
his own class and kind because of shyness, self-consciousness, and rear of rejection.” This is
undoubtedly true, but Prufrock’s inability to feel love has something to do with his inability to
make love, too … a simple desire, lust, is more than honest Prufrock can cope with as he
mounts the stairs.
But Prufrock is coping with another, less simple desire as well … If birth, copulation, and
death is all there is, then, once we are born, once we have copulated, only death remains (for
the male of the species, at least). Prufrock, having “known them all already, known them all,”
having “known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,” having “measured out” his life “with
coffee spoons,” desires death. The “overwhelming question” that assails him would no longer
be the romantic’s rhetorical “Is life worth living?” (to which the answer is obviously No), but the
more immediate shocker: “Should one commit suicide?” which is to say: “Should I?”…
… The poem makes clear that Prufrock wants more than the “entire destruction of
consciousness as we understand it,” a notion Prufrock expresses by wishing he were “a pair of
ragged claws, /Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Prufrock wants death itself, physical
death, and the poem, I believe, is explicit about this desire.
Not only does Prufrock seem to be tired of time – “time yet for a hundred indecision” –
a tiredness that goes far beyond the acedia Prufrock is generally credited with feeling, if only
because “there will be time to murder and create, time, in other words (in one sense at least)
to copulate, but Prufrock is also tired of his own endless vanities, from feeling he must “prepare
a face to meet the faces that you meet,” to having to summon up those ironies with which to
contemplate his own thin arms and legs, and, indeed, to asking if, in the rather tedious
enterprise of preparing for copulation, the moment is work “forcing to it crisis.” No wonder
Prufrock compares himself to John the Baptist and, in conjuring up this first concrete image of
his own death, sees his head brought in upon a platter. That would be the easy way out. He
had, after all, “wept and fasted, wept and prayed,” but he realizes he is no prophet – and no
Salome will burst into passion, will ignite for him. When the eternal Footman, Death, who
holds his coat, snickers, he does so because Prufrock has let “the moment” of his “greatness”
flicker, because Prufrock was unable to comply with the one imperative greatness would have
thrust upon him: to kill himself. Prufrock explains: “I was afraid,” Yet the achievement of his
vision at the end of the poem, his being able to linger “in the chambers of the sea/ By sea-girls
wreathed with seaweed red and brown,” is an act of the imagination that only physical death
can complete, unless Prufrock wants human voices to wake him , and drown him. His romantic
vision demands the voluntary act: suicide. It is to be expected that he will fail in this too, as he
has failed in everything else.

Baumann, Michael L. “Let Us Ask ‘What is It,’” Arizona Quarterly.