Basement Window Access into T. S. Eliot’s Poetry: An Analysis of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an abandoned house in possession of notoriety for being haunted, must be in want of young boys seeking adventure.

So, in kind, is the poetry of T. S. Eliot.

It continues to attract curious intruders more than a century later. Many literary adventurers are brave enough to scale the trellis of the rose garden to reach a second story window just to get a peek inside. Unfortunately, gaining access to the poetry of Eliot requires more than adventurous curiosity and good climbing skills. Methinks it must require something like a more cultivated perspective; therefore, I confess with C. S. Lewis:

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening—any evening—would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain; I simply wasn’t able.

Thus, in a short series of forthcoming posts, I will make an effort to pry open a basement window and see if we cannot gain access to Eliot through “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” one of the foundational works of Eliot’s corpus. 

If we are successful, we can leave a window discreetly propped open so we can return with our friends and crawl through it again later. To say this another way, although Eliot’s poetry is notoriously inaccessible and difficult to understand—it feels exceptionally dense for novice readers of his work due to his obsession with obscure allusions—hopefully, we can work through the poem so that it can serve us all as a diving board into the greater body of his work. 

Before we begin our work, however, let us consider a short biographical sketch of Eliot before analyzing the title of the poem in a follow-up post.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He was educated at Harvard, but also studied at Sarbonne and Oxford, eventually emigrating to England from the U.S., taking English citizenship—and an English persona, many would say. He was influenced by Irving Babbitt, Arthur Symons, and Jules Laforgue, among others. Ezra Pound thought his work genius, made a place for him among the notable poets of the era, and helped publish much of his work, including the current poem under consideration. 

After surprising the literary world with his conversion to Christianity, Eliot became “the principle champion of the moral imagination in the twentieth century,” according to Russell Kirk.