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The Lovesong Of J Alfred Prufrock Allusions Essay

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The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock written by T.S. Elliot, is the despondent poem of a middle-aged man named Prufrock suffering from an acute spiritual malaise due to his monotonous and tentative existence. Eliot beautifully told Prufrock's tale through careful use of literary devices. A device that appeared frequently throughout the poem was an allusion. These allusions were used to easily bring forth the impressions and characteristics conveyed by the sources alluded to, as well as creating flexibility for his readers. Hamlet, To His Coy Mistress, and The Bible are a few notable sources that Eliot alludes to within the poem.
Eliot particularly favored the poet Andrew Marvell, the renowned author of To His Coy Mistress. To summarize blatantly, it is a poem about a man trying to convince a woman to sleep with him. The underlying message however is to seize the day. Marvell’s poem is alluded to multiple times throughout The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. The two poems contrast with each other in their character and in meaning. While Prufrock remains strongly self conscious and questions his own existence, the man in Marvell’s poem is portrayed as a confident bachelor ready to make the most of the time he has. This contrast makes allusions …show more content…

Alfred Prufrock are an echo of To His Coy Mistress’ “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball” (41-42). Here an allusion is made to bring forth that contrast between the two characters. With only two lines, Eliot is able to draw a potent connection between the difference in the characters. The inclusion of this allusion can also be interpreted in a myriad of ways that is dependent on the reader and their understanding of the source alluded to. Eliot may not have wanted to address a certain issue directly so he shifted the responsibility of interpretation to the

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In T.S. Eliot’s work “The LoveSong of J. Alfred Prufrock”, he uses diction to give an underlying meaning and tone to his poem in order to express the downfall of a man. The author uses his diction to give this poem Its tone as if he regrets what he did in life. He also shows great tone changes in this work, giving this poem a dramatic, almost tragic outlook. Many of his word choices also give his work an underlying meaning and adds to his theme and messages. A large part of his poem is also using metaphors to add to this underlying meaning and give more force to this tone he is trying to create.

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Alfred Prufrock is not a very interesting man, and odds are neither is his dating profile. Alfred is a man that just sort of drifts aimlessly from one common task to the next. However, he seems to think that the things he does is important and that he has a life changing question, although we never learn what it is. I get the impression that Prufrock is somewhat of an arrogant person because he always thinks that what he is doing is very important.

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Elliot simply used these allusions to tell his own story, sometimes giving new meanings to quotes, or adding emphasis to new words or phrases. Often, these references had to be understood themselves for a reader to truly know what was being said in one of Elliot’s works. One such work that contains so many references to past writers and works, is “The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock”. The story of Prufrock is an intriguing one dominated by allusions and many references to earlier works of literature that Elliot himself read, and applied to a story of a modern man.

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The overall subject of the poem would be Prufrock's indecisiveness. Throughout the poem there are multiple tones and they all relate back to the theme of self-doubt. For most of the poem the tone would be loneliness because Prufrock always relates to isolation and distance. He also compares himself to other lonely things. “There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” (5 th stanza 4 th line) shows that there is a shift in the tone which turns from loneliness to hopefulness.

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This self-denial gives him further resolve at the end of the poem to still refuse to propose. Eliot’s allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet is clever in this way because in the play Hamlet is also indecisive; so much so that he needs a reminder from his father’s ghost to kill his uncle, Claudius, who killed his father, took the throne, and married his mother (Shmoop). In this same portion of the poem as the Hamlet allusion, Prufrock admits that he thinks he’s too old to marry, that he is so old fashioned he still “wear[s] the bottoms of [his] trousers rolled” (Greenblatt 1304, line 121). This shows the reader that Prufrock still is adamant that he is not going to propose to the

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