The dramatic monologue "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), an artistically fresh, visually inventive work, is a landmark of emerging modernism. Composed during the poet's period of casting about for a career and lifestyle, it blends the Victorian forms and rhythms of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning with the disdain and self-doubt of Charles Baudelaire. Eliot prefaces the poem with an epitaph in Italian from Inferno, Dante's epic journey into hell. The 131-line main text opens in a seedy part of London, a modern parallel of hell in its joylessness and perpetual torment. Propelled by the walk of the speaker and an unidentified "you," the action moves over doubts and questions neatly unified by rhymed couplets, interspersed in lines 3 and 10 with the odd incidents of unrhymed endings. Surreal and menacing, the skewering of the protagonist Prufrock on a surgical table terrorizes at the same time that it draws the viewer to a subject pinned down for study like an insect in the lab.
The theme is an overt admission of weakness: The speaker confesses an inability to commit to sexual love. Prufrock has become a twentieth-century cliché for the prissy, conflicted bachelor obsessed with a balding head and prim wardrobe and mannerisms, not unlike Eliot himself. Like the sinuous fog, his gaze glides indoors, then outdoors, from surgery to street, social gathering, storm drains, terrace, and back into the "soft October night," another reference to his flaccid character. The juxtaposition of trivialities with life-disturbing doubts stretches out the tedium of modern life over "a hundred visions and revisions," an internal rhyme with "decisions." Unlike the outward control of selecting a tie pin or creasing his slacks, Prufrock's inner turmoil threatens to "disturb the universe." The pathetic hyperbole frames his chaotic thoughts, which swirl around the unexpressed question that dogs him.
