In a previous post, I introduced T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and promised to try and pry a basement window open and provide some low-level access to the poem’s meaning.
In this post, we’ll simply investigate the poem’s title. There are two primary aspects worthy of consideration in this initial analysis.
First, Eliot calls it The Love Song, which should insinuate to the reader what kind of poem it is. Second, the quality of the narrator’s name, J. Alfred Prufrock, is altogether tasteless. It evokes images of a character like Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice.
Beginning with the subject of the title, The Love Song, note that it anticipates some romantic intent, or sentimental quality. It could be a poem about a man named Prufrock, and his courtship with a woman. Since he doesn’t actually court anyone in any real sense of the word, this seems unlikely. On the other hand, it is possible to think of it as a love ballad about Prufrock. This would have merit, but only if it was meant to be ironic, since Prufrock appears to be relationally impotent, both verbally and sexually.
There is an interesting note Grover Smith makes about the influence Jules Laforgue had on Eliot that is helpful here. He says,
Laforgue’s own temperament was romantic, but his manner was cynical. He had a disposition to jibe clownishly at sentiment…he wrote poems deriding in one passage the tenderness of another. Eliot accommodated this idiosyncrasy to his own needs; it helped him veil personal agonies with impersonal ironies.
In the Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling (1959), Eliot wrote,
I once wrote a poem called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: I am convinced that it would never have been called a Love Song but for a title of Kipling’s that stuck obstinately in my head, The Love Song of Har Dyal.
This suggests that the title of the poem is actually an ironic allusion to a work by Rudyard Kipling where Eliot is, literally, jibing clownishly at the sentiment of love.
Next, something must be made of the name, J. Alfred Prufrock.
While the reader will learn later that the narrator, presumably Prufrock, is aged, insecure, and self-loathing, it is the unusual and even awkward name itself which hints at the narrator’s awkwardness in the poem. Eliot affirms this idea, saying of the name Prufrock, “I chose the name because it sounded to me very very prosaic.”
In the same article, he goes on to explain how he often chose names because they sounded “euphonious.”
To a large degree, the title is a matter of aesthetics more than anything else, and to move away from the house metaphor in the previous post, it is but one example of the myriad literary tributaries that flowed into Eliot’s imaginative pond.
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