The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

Dramatic MonologueA dialogue is a conversation between two people, but a monologue is just one person talking. ("Mono" means "one). But "Prufrock" is a "dramatic" monologue because the person talki...

PrufrockThere are at least three sides to our speaker, Prufrock. On one side we have the sneaky trickster, who invites us on a romantic walk only to lead us down windy roads and point out that the...

We start this journey in a dark, smelly neighborhood of London. It’s October. Steam is rising from the streets, and a sick yellow fog circulates around the crooked houses. Drunks are stumblin...

Eliot was kind enough to provide us with the perfect metaphor for the sound of this poem. It’s the cat-like fog that pads around the city in endless circles (lines 13-22). Eliot’s verse...

The original title of this poem wasn’t "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It was – ready for this? – "Prufrock Among the Women." We’re glad Eliot changed his mind about...

Hidden Literary AllusionsIn poems like "The Waste Land," Eliot takes the time-honored principle of literary name-dropping to a whole new level. The poem has footnotes, for Pete’s sake! "Prufr...

(7) Snow LineEliot frightens people more than almost any other poet. Like other modernists, he sometimes uses foreign language in his poems, and here we get an Epigraph in Italian. He also slips in...

One of the possible titles that Eliot didn’t use for this poem was "Inventions of the March Hare". (Source)Even graffiti vandals in Pennsylvania have been reading Eliot. (Source)Prufrock isn&...

PGThings start off racy as we walk through what appears to be a red-light district or some other seedy neighborhood, but Prufrock is too afraid of bodies to show us anything more than a hairy arm.

Literature, Philosophy, and MythologyDante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 27, lines 61-66 (epigraph)Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" (line 23, first reference)Hesiod, Works and Days (line 29)Willia...