![]() The other commands which Donne’s verse lists are all similarly difficult or impossible. A ‘mandrake root’ is a plant associated with fertility in the Old Testament, but the idea of getting the plant pregnant (rather than it helping a human woman to conceive) turns the usual association on its head. It seems likely that Prufrock is nervously hopping from one subject to another, within his own mind, while he struggles to fit in at the social events, the tea parties and drawing-room soirees, which he attends, in the company of those women who talk ‘of Michelangelo’ while (at least in Prufrock’s own imagination) gossiping about how thin he, and his hair, is when they think he’s out of earshot.Ĭatching a falling star is, of course, impossible. The style of ‘Prufrock’ has been likened to stream of consciousness, that much-misunderstood device more commonly associated with fiction than poetry. ![]() We cannot always be sure that what he is confiding to us is actually being uttered: we may instead have a direct line to his thoughts, to the inside of his head, as his mind wanders from thought to thought and subject to subject, from John the Baptist to his male-pattern baldness, from Prince Hamlet to lonely men in shirtsleeves hanging out of windows. There is something far more meandering, too, about his meditations and thoughts, which range from the trivial (does he dare to eat a peach?) to the cosmic (does he dare disturb the universe?). But Prufrock is a modern-day, urban speaker, who talks frankly about his failures: chiefly, his failure to ‘grasp the nettle’ or ‘seize the day’, his lack of sexual fulfilment, and his overall sense of failure. Tennyson and Browning virtually invented this new form of poetry in the 1830s and 1840s, and their names were synonymous with it. Alfred Prufrock’ about? It’s a dramatic monologue, but utterly unlike those written by Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the previous century. This ground-breaking modernist poem has attracted many interpretations, involving everything from psychoanalysis to biographical readings, but it remains an elusive poem.īut what is ‘The Love Song of J. Harold Monro, an influential publisher and owner of the Poetry Bookshop in London, was offered the chance to publish the poem but flung it back, labelling it ‘insane’. It was his friend and fellow poet (and fellow American) who hawked it around the poetry publishers to find someone willing to publish this dazzlingly new kind of verse. Alfred Prufrock’ was written in 1910 while Eliot was still a student at Harvard, in his early twenties. Alfred Prufrock’ has been called, by the critic Christopher Ricks, the best first poem in a first volume of poems: it opened Eliot’s debut collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917, having been first published two years earlier in Poetry magazine. ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each’ is one of the most famous lines from a poem filled with famous lines.
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