It is not atypical for a perfectly ordinary combination of experiences and opportunities to have an extraordinary result.
How so young and comparatively isolated a poet came to write one of the most famous poems of the early 20th century, itself one of the most productive periods of literary accomplishments and advances in English since the time of Shakespeare, remains something of a mystery. To give that permanent human impulse a body, Eliot would argue, is the function of poetry. Those are just a few of the problems that the poem poses for readers to this day, and yet its enduring reputation as a masterwork of 20th-century literature serves as a reminder that the work endures not because of its critical reputation, which is considerable, or because of its difficulties, which are equally so, but because of its great beauty as a work expressing what Eliot would later call a permanent human impulse. Rather, the further the poem proceeds, the more it seems as if Prufrock is speaking to no one but himself, since one of the points that he continually stresses is that no one will listen to him in any case, no matter what he says or does. Does this “we,” for example, truly drown in a sea of human voices, or does it drown in some other sort of sea because those voices have awakened it, and if so, from what, and what, then, is that other sea? And why the editorial “we,” anyhow, when it is clear that Prufrock has been speaking till that moment of and for himself? But has he been? The poem opens, after all, with that invitation to “you and I,” a definite “we” again, no doubt, but not one that can be easily identified. Alfred Prufrock” continues to challenge readers’ expectations both of what constitutes poetry and what constitutes meaning. “Make it new,” Pound’s poetic rule of thumb became the rallying cry for an age of virtually ceaseless exploration, innovation, and experimentation in both the themes and the methods of poetry writing, and it casts some light on the quality of Eliot’s achievement that Pound would famously remark that, with “Prufrock,” Eliot had made himself modern all on his own.įrom the title itself to the ominously cryptic ending, in which an anonymous “we” drowns in sea of human voices, the poetry of “The Love Song of J. However, the poem strikes readers as being as fresh and new today as it was when Pound first encountered it, because, among its many other features, “Prufrock” remains a classic example of literary modernism, a work from that period in literary history that prided itself on its capacity for never repeating the same act twice.
While it would be wrong to give either Eliot or his poem too much of the credit for creating a revolution in the art of poetry writing, the fact remains that readers of today do have the advantage of hindsight, so they come to “Prufrock” as a poem whose reputation precedes it-a remarkable feat considering that the work of literature in question is not some ancient text by Homer or Aeschylus, or even a venerable classic from the time of Dante Alighieri or William Shakespeare, but was first composed less than a century ago, when its creator was barely 23. Nevertheless, for those who were avid supporters of the revolution in the arts then taking place, the publication of “Prufrock” signaled a turning point in the art of writing American poetry from which there would henceforth be no turning back. Certainly the great world did not come to a standstill to witness let alone pay homage to the event of the poem’s publication. As with any other event of great moment in its particular field, hindsight may give an unfair advantage. Alfred Prufrock was first published in Poetry magazine in 1915, thanks in large part to the good offices of another relatively young American poet, Ezra Pound. No poet in memory has ever had quite so spectacular a debut as the young T.
0 kommentar(er)
