T.S. Eliot was one of the most prominent writers of the Modernist movement. His “modernism” was a quest for reality, poetic expression and a commentary on modern society. According to Debadrita Chakraborty there is a growing sense of “aloofness, alienation and rootlessness” in the works of modernist writer T.S. Eliot (1). This is certainly true for his works “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land”. These works, written in the early days of the Modernist writing movement, show Eliot’s displeasure with the modern world he inhabited. This attitude is reflected in the two works mentioned above, and are expressed in the themes of isolation and miscommunication.
While the title suggests that The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock is a love poem, the poem centres around the theme of isolation, as can be seen by the use of pronouns and the isolation of certain lines on the type page. Throughout the poem, several second-person pronouns are used, examples of which can be found in line 31 (”Time for you and time for me”), line 78 (”Stretched on the floor here beside you and me”), line 81 (”Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me”) and line 95 (”Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”). These lines indicate that the speaker is addressing someone and thus is not as isolated as the thesis of this essay would suggest. A close reading of the poem shows that most of the time such a second-person is mentioned, a first-person pronoun also occurs in the