Abstract
This is the second of two unforeseen essays on the most familiar English poem of the twentieth century. My original intention was simply to write a modest (and tractable) piece pointing to certain important qualities of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ I did not find mentioned in the extensive published criticism. It was frustrated by a gradual awareness of the extraordinary historical relationship Eliot’s poem has both with (to use his word) the tradition behind it, and with English literature and literary criticism since its advent.
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Notes
‘The poem conceived as a thing in between the poet and the audience is of course an abstraction. The poem is an act…. But if we are to lay hold of the poetic act to comprehend and evaluate it, and if it is to pass current as a critical object, it must be hypostatized.’ W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1954) p. xvii. The Chicago ‘Neo-Aristotelian’ critics’ emphasis on ‘wholes’ expresses the connection between Aristotle and the modernist critics.
See, for instance: review by Fred W. Householder, Jr. of Zellig S. Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), International Journal of American Linguistics, 18 (1952) pp. 260–8, p. 260
André Martinet, ‘Structure and Language’, in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1970) p. 7
Allan Calder, ‘Constructive Mathematics’, Scientific American, 241 (October 1979) pp. 146–71 (quoted phrases on p. 146).
R. G. Peterson, ‘Concentric Structure and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”’, T. S. Eliot Review 3 (1976) pp. 25–8, adduces Eliot’s ‘roots in old traditions of number and symmetry’ (p. 28), and proposes ‘the repetition in reverse order of nine thematic groupings of obviously related images’ (p. 26), around the couplet about perfume from a dress ‘at the exact numerical center of the poem (11. 65–66)’ (p. 25). Although some of Peterson’s formulation seem Procrustean to me, enough of the images and themes in the poem are symmetrically disposed to augment their other chiastic patterns. In ‘Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature’, PMLA 91 (1976) pp. 367– 75, Peterson discusses ‘numerological and symmetrical patterns’ throughout Western literature, and recent critical attention to them.
Piers Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development: 1909–1922 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982) p. 56.
Morris Weitz, ‘A “Reading” of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”’, The Philosophy of the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950) pp. 93–107, p. 95; Understanding Poetry, 2nd ed., pp. 434, 440.
For the persistence of this view, see Burton Raffel, T. S. Eliot (New York: Ungar, 1982) p. 26.
Frederick W. Locke, ‘Dante and T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock’, Modern Language Notes, 78 (1963) pp. 51–9.
Philip R. Headings, T. S. Eliot, Revised Edition (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982) pp. 24–5. The interpretation is not in the original (1964) edition,
Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot (New York: Macmillan-Collier, 1972) p. 16
A. D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 33.
Headings, p. 21; and J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1969) p. 139.
Gertrude Patterson, T. S. Eliot: poems in the making (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971) p. 110; Morgan and Wohlstetter, p. 27. See also Unger, T. S. Eliot, pp. 19–20.
For an even more apparent narrative inconsistency in The Waste Land, involving the use of quotation marks in ‘The Burial of the Dead’, see Stanley Sultan, Ulysses, The Waste Land and Modernism: A Jubilee Study (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat, 1977) pp. 63–4.
See R. S. Crane, ‘Introduction’, Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) pp. 13–17; the quoted phrases are on p. 13. Crane’s thesis is that Aristotle was supplanted by a ‘Hellenistic-Roman Romantic tradition’; in that tradition, the Formalist-Cognitive critics lack ‘sufficient theoretical bases for’ considering ‘the peculiar natures of the artistic wholes’ writers ‘were engaged in constructing’ out of their ‘commitment to certain kinds of poetic structures and effects rather than others’ (p. 15).
For intertextualité, see, for instance, Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (ed. Roudiez), (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) pp. 36–8.
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Sultan, S. (1990). The Function of ‘Prufrock’ for Criticism. In: Bagchee, S. (eds) T. S. Eliot Annual No. 1. Macmillan Literary Annuals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07790-8_9
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