The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Themes

It’s hard to tell whether Prufrock is really in love with the person he is talking to. He speaks about himself a lot, and he ignores her, or "us," for most of the poem. Maybe he’s too s...

The poem’s epigraph is a quotation of Guido da Montefeltro, a particularly manipulative chap who finds a place near the bottom of Dante’s Hell in Inferno. Right away, this epigraph sets...

Oh, Prufrock, why didn’t you just go into your lover’s "chamber" and ask her your darned "overwhelming question" when you had the chance?! Prufrock is the dramatic equivalent of a bump...

In relation to time, this poem is a total trip. It ricochets back and forth between the past and the future, almost never settling on the present. One moment Prufrock is talking about all the thing...

There seem to be no complete human beings in this poem. There are only bits and pieces of people: an arm here, some eyes there, maybe a couple of voices in the next room. The person whose appearanc...