Modernism:

Individualism: the individual is more interesting than society.

Experimentation: Modernist writers broke free of old forms and techniques.
Absurdity. The senseless violence of WWII was yet more evidence that humanity had lost its way. Modernist
authors depicted this absurdity in their works. Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis, Symbolism
Formalism: Writers of the Modernist period saw literature more as a craft than a flowering of creativity.

Modernistic work: Their issues are focused on those experienced by contemporary people, deprived of spiritual
life, emptiness and meaninglessness. It is intellectual poetry, requiring great erudition, full of allusions, ironic
and grotesque.

Eliot: who was he?

In Eliot's political views, there is a strong criticism of parliamentary democracy, which he accused of losing
moral values
The main cause of evil lies in upbringing. Eliot criticizes the educational system for imposing foreign patterns,
shaping excessive individualism, and not developing moral attitudes in young people.

as a Christian thinker, and thus referring to faith in spiritual and eternal value. He wanted a moral order, to
return to traditional Christian values.

Dramatic Monologue

A dialogue is a conversation between two people, but a monologue is just one person talking. ("Mono" means
"one). But "Prufrock" is a "dramatic" monologue because the person talking is a fictional creation, and his
intended audience is fictional as well. He is talking to the woman he loves, about whom we know very little
except for the stray detail about shawls and hairy arms. On the surface, "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock" relays the thoughts of a sexually frustrated middle-aged man who wants to say something but
is afraid to do so, and ultimately does not.

FORMA

So, the overarching form is the dramatic monologue, but if you look closer at the poem, you’ll find that Eliot is
experimenting with all kinds of forms and meters.

The rhymes also have a singsong quality that makes them seem childish. He rhymes "is it" with "visit"?
Come on. But this is Prufrock’s song, and Eliot is just pulling the strings to make him look bad

Other lines don’t rhyme and sound more like free verse, which has no regular meter. Occasionally we’ll
get a couple of lines of blank verse, which have no rhyme but a regular meter, usually iambic pentameter,
where an unstressed syllable is followed by an accent. This is the meter that Shakespeare used most often,
and Eliot was a huge fan of Shakespeare. Thus, "I SHOULD have BEEN a PAIR of RAG-ged CLAWS."
C. Prufrock stresses how different he is from Hamlet in order to highlight himself as braver and more
heroic

Shakespeare also used rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, and, lo and behold, this it the form we get in
lines 111-119, which discuss Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Using Shakespeare’s verse to talk about Shakespeare?
T.S., you clever man.

ŚRODKI STYLISTYCZNE
Ironia: One theory is that Prufrock's name combines the words "prude" and "frock," which together characterize
Prufrock as prudish and perhaps somewhat womanly.

Blank verse refers to poetry written in regular metrical but unrhymed lines.
Free verse refers to an open form of poetry that has no rhyme or rhythm

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or

two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At
times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.