Aiken, Conrad | Robert F. Fleissner (essay date 1992)
Robert F. Fleissner (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "Reverberations of Prufrock's Evening Performance in Aiken's 'Morning Song of Senlin'," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, September, 1992, pp. 31-40.
[In the following essay, Fleissner discusses the similarity of one of Aiken's poems to one of T. S. Eliot's and concludes that Eliot is the more original and profound of the two writers.]
Because Conrad Aiken was close enough to the youthful Eliot to dub him "Tse-tse," as is well known, conjuring up the possibly fly-like insect image in "Prufrock" (as with "When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall," but compare also "They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!'"), it is worth seeing how he most probably "echoed" the monologue in his well-known "Morning Song of Senlin" (also known as "Morning Song from 'Senlin'").1 To begin, the descriptive phrase "…Song of Senlin" may be thought of as a resonance of "Song of …Prufrock,"...
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