SOURCE: “Prufrock of St. Louis,” in Prairie Schooner, Vol. XXXI, No.1, Spring, 1957, pp. 24-30.

The name of Prufrock-Littau, furniture wholesalers, appeared in advertisements in St. Louis, Missouri, in the first decade of the present century; in 1911 a young Missourian's whimsical feline humor prefixed the name of Prufrock to what has become the best-known English poem since the Rubaiyat. The savor of that act had faded from the memory of the sexagenarian London man of letters who wrote to a mid-century enquirer that his appropriation of the now-famous German surname must have been “quite unconscious.” There would be no point in denying that it probably was; but the unconscious mind of T. S. Eliot once glimmered with a rich mischief which for many years has been much more cautiously disclosed than it was in 1911.

The query itself must have amused him, however; Mr. Eliot's dealings with people who wanted to know what he was concealing have for two decades afforded some of the richest comedy in the annals of literary anecdote. Letter after letter, visitor after visitor, he answers with unfailing plangent courtesy. After The Confidential Clerk was produced, a journalist, teased by implications he couldn't pin down, or perhaps simply assigned a turn of duty at poet-baiting, wanted to know what it meant. It means what it says, said Mr. Eliot patiently. No more? Certainly, no more. But supposing, the journalist pursued, supposing you had meant something else, would you not have put some other meaning more plainly? “No,” Mr. Eliot replied, “I should have put it just as obscurely.”

No other writer's verse has inspired so tenacious a conviction that it means more than it seems to. Certainly no other modern verses so invade the mind, attracting to themselves in the months following their ingestion reminiscence, desire, and speculation. Eliot deals in effects, not ideas; and the effects are in an odd way wholly verbal, seemingly endemic to the language, scrupulously concocted out of the expressive gestures of what a reader whose taste has been educated in the 19th-century classics takes poetry to be.

That is why they will not leave the mind, which grows bored with ideas but will never leave off fondling phrases. How much of the grotesque melancholy of “Prufrock” radiates from the protagonist's name would be difficult to estimate. It was surgical economy that used the marvellous name once only, in the title, and compounded it with a fatuous “J. Alfred.” It was a talent already (aetat. 23) finely schooled that with nice audacity weighed in a single phrase the implications of this name against those of “Love Song.” It was genius that separated the speaker of the monologue from the writer of the poem by the solitary device of affixing an unforgettable title. Having done that, Eliot didn't need to keep fending off his protagonist with facile irony; the result was a poised intimacy which could draw on every emotion the young author knew without incurring the liabilities of “self-expression.”

This complex deftness in the title of his first long poem epitomizes the nature of Eliot's best early verse. Every phrase seems composed as though the destiny of the author's soul depended on it, yet it is unprofitable not to consider the phrases as arrangements of words before considering them as anything else. Like the thousand little gestures that constitute good manners, their meaning is contained in themselves alone. Eliot is the most verbal of the eminent poets: more verbal than Swinburne. If he has carried verbalism far beyond the mere extirpation of jarring consonants, it is because of his intimate understanding of what language can do: how its “tentacular roots,” as he once said, reach “down to the deepest terrors and desires.” Only a poet who came after the nineteenth century and grew up in its shadow could have acquired this understanding. Eliot acquired it early, and was able to coerce a small masterpiece into existence at a time when, according to his later standards, he understood very little else.

“Prufrock” exploits the 19th century's specialized plangencies at every turn.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Everyone remembers these lines. They manage to be ridiculous without being funny (the speaker is not making a joke) or cruel (a joke is not being made about the speaker). Their mechanism is allied to the mock-heroic but it doesn't burlesque anything. Like a side-show mermaid, this non-sequitur of an aging Bostonian floats embalmed in dark sonorities whose cloudiness almost conceals the stitching between mammal and fish. We feel that the two halves won't conjoin at the very instant of being persuaded they do. The vowels sound very fine, the syllables are impeccably cadenced; but vaguely within one's pleasure at Tennysonian excellence there struggles an intimation of the absurd, with no more chance of winging clear into view than a wasp in a jar of molasses.

The phenomenon of sound obscuring deficiencies of sense from writer and reader is often to be observed in English poetry; the Romantics may be said to have elevated it into a procédé. Mr. Eliot's originality consisted in allowing the deficiency to be concealed only from the speaker. The writer is too cool not to have known what he was about, and as for the reader, his pleasure consists precisely in experiencing a disproportion difficult to isolate. The certainty that Prufrock himself understands it no better than we do checks any pursuit of “metaphysical” analogies between senility and trouser-bottoms; and as for Prufrock's mind, where the collocation is supposed to be taking place, its workings are nowhere very profoundly explored. His sensibility is plumbed to the uttermost, but that is not what is usually meant when a poet is praised for revealing a human soul. To say that Prufrock is contemplating a young blade's gesture, or alternatively an old castoff's, rolling up his trousers because he either hasn't learned to care for dignity or has outgrown its claims, is to substitute for the poetic effect a formula that fails to exhaust it because incapable of touching it. For the purposes of the effect, the pathos of the character of Prufrock is no more than a donnée. And the effect is unique, and no reader has ever forgotten it.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” most clings to the memory whenever it exploits, as a foil to undistinguished middle age, the authorized sonorities of the best English verse, circa 1870:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The closed and open o's, the assonances of room, women, and come, the pointed caesura before the polysyllabic burst of “Michaelangelo” weave a context of grandeur within which our feeling about these trivial women determines itself. The heroic sound, and especially the carefully dramatized sound of the painter's name is what muffles these women. The lines scale down severely in French:

Dans la pièce les femmes vont et viennent
En parlant des maîtres de Sienne.

That the translator has caught the sense and approximated the movement is an achievement strangely insufficient for lines whose poetic mechanism, one might have thought, depended on so simple a contrast of conceptions: talking women, and a heroic visionary. But Eliot's effects traffic only marginally with conceptions. Hence—again—the elusive disproportion from which his humor arises, a delicate vapor in whose aura the lights twinkle.

Tennyson, to whom Eliot owes so much, does not smile; “He really did hold,” as G. K. Chesterton said, “many of the same ideas as Queen Victoria, though gifted with a more fortunate literary style.” It was in the nature of things impossible for him to realize that the peculiar medium he had perfected from Coleridgean beginnings was a totally unsuitable climate for the conducting of human thought. This perception was reserved for his friend Edward Lear, another of Eliot's mentors, whose wistful incantations—

… Where the purple river rolls fast and dim
And the ivory ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around
Stamping our feet with a flumpy sound

—provide a sort of middle term between Coleridge's incantation on the running of Alph the Sacred River and

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

This embryology isn't adduced in belittlement; whatever Coleridge and Lear may have been up to, Eliot has so disciplined the procedures for securing “an air of meaning rather than meaning itself” that—in his later work at least—the spectacle of their operation can itself imply meaning of a still more austere kind.

Lear, however, wasn't a technical innovator; he discovered his comic method by contemplating not the state of the poetic tradition but (Prufrock-like) his own artistic futility. Tennyson remains the Victorian norm. “His feelings,” Eliot has noted, “were more honest than his mind,” and his feeling found continually exact expression—

                                                  … but far away
The noise of life begins again
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

But he made, notoriously, attempts to think in this kind of verse—

Are God and Nature then at strife?

—which are really mistaken attempts to exploit the apparent inclusiveness of his poetic world (it contains so much that it ought to contain everything) and which emphasize by their lameness the sacrifices through which that air of inclusiveness has been achieved. A sphere is self-bounded because its surface is turning away at every instant from possible tangents.

What was bequeathed to the young poets of 1910 by their predecessors in England was a world made out of words; much of Tennyson and most of Swinburne has no more bite on the realities outside the dictionary than have the verses of Jabberwocky. It cohered by exploiting the sounds of the words and the implications concealed in their sounds; “A cry that shivered to the tingling stars” would be a strikingly impoverished line if the English language could be suddenly purged of the words “twinkling” and “tinkling.” T. S. Eliot from the first has leaned on words in that way; it was the name of Prufrock that attracted him; no information about the St. Louis bearers of that name can throw the smallest light on his poem. In the few juvenilia that have been preserved we find him manipulating sounds in Johnson's way—

The Flowers I sent thee when the dew
          Was trembling on the vine
Were withered ere the wild bee flew
          To pluck the eglantine. …

(1905)

or Swinburne's—

Their petals are fanged and red
With hideous streak and stain. …

(1908)

or Tennyson's—

The moonflower opens to the moth,
          The mist crawls in from the sea;
A great white bird, a snowy owl,
          Slips from the alder tree. …

(1909)

Two years later he wrote “Prufrock.” It was the Tennysonian medium that he learned to use; characteristically, he took what it seemed proper to take at the time, the manner of his immediate elders. He learned to use it; he never made the mistake of trying to think in it. Aware both of its limitations and of its extraordinary emotional inclusiveness, he contrives instead to give the impression that thought is going on alongside the poetic process, that sardonic eyes are being frequently bent on the pretensions toward which rhythmic speech incorrigibly reaches, and that whole areas of human life which the sentiments of romantic verbalism have appropriated are patently, to a rational vision, entoiled in richly muffled absurdity—

They will say “But how his arms and legs are thin!”

Such is the situation that “Prufrock” dramatizes: a muffling of rational behavior by rhetoric. To the aggrandizement of that situation the poet brings every conceivable wile. The epigraph is a piece of calculated opportunism:

S'io credisse che ma risponse fosse. …

“If I thought that my response would be addressed to one who might go back alive, this flame would shake no more; but since no one ever goes back alive out of these deeps (if what I hear be true), without fear of infamy I answer you.”

Senza tema d'infamia ti risponso.

From these Italian words the English speech moves forward without a break—

Let us go then, you and I …

—effecting a liaison between this situation and Dante's which is all the smoother for the reflective, lingering rhythm of the opening phrase. For the next twenty lines Eliot brings all his melodic resources to the incantation of a quiet fin-de-siècle inferno, equipped with nightmare streets that “follow” and are ominously “half-deserted,” and inimical clouds of yellow fog. It is a hell neither sustained by a theology nor graduated by degrees of crime; a genteel accumulation of stage effects, nothing quite in excess. It isn't a punishment so much as a state. Somewhere beyond or around it lies the world where questions have answers, but the moment an “overwhelming question” is mentioned we are cautioned,

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Above this monotonous emotional pedal-point runs a coruscating texture of effects. For twelve lines the word “time” reverberates, struck again and again, while (punctuated once by the startling precision of “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”) portentousness overlays mere sonority:

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

What “murder and create” may mean we cannot tell, though it is plain what the phrase can do; the words have lost their connection with the active world, lost in fact everything but their potential for neurasthenic shock. “Time for you and time for me” is as hypnotic and as meaningless as a phrase on the cellos. The yellow smoke rubbing its back upon windowpanes is a half-realizable picture; the detail about the hands and the plate has the air of being a picture but in fact isn't, the thing that is dropped on the plate being “a question,” and the hands—blurred by the phrase “works and days” which is a fusion of Hesiod and Ecclesiastes (III, 1-8)—being not quite those of God and not quite those of a butler.

And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate …

These gravely irrational words evoke a nervous system snubbed by the Absolute without committing themselves as to whether that Absolute is the moral rigor of an implacable Creator or the systematized social discomfort of a Boston tea-party.

The first half of “Prufrock,” in fact, is devoted to a systematic confusion of temporal and eternal disciplines; this man's doom is an endless party-going—

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

—which he is no more at liberty to modify than one of Dante's subjects can desert his circle of Hell. As he moves wearily through the fog toward yet another entrance-hall he can toy with images of rebellion—

And indeed there will be time
To wonder “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

But one doesn't—the switch from social to cosmic is typical—“disturb the universe.” In Hell you do what you are doing.