"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Quiz

Answer: True

The poem was first published in the June 1915 issue of "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse". Later, in 1917, it was published in the chapbook "Prufrock and Other Observations", which included twelve of Eliot's poems. Eliot's famous poem "The Wasteland" didn't follow until 1921.

Answer: A dramatic monologue

The poem tells the experience of Prufrock in first person through a stream-of-conscious dramatic monologue. The monologue appears to be internal, though there is some debate about this among critics because of the use of second person: "Let us go then, you and I..." The narrator's feelings of isolation and disillusionment are highlighted. An earlier draft of this poem, with additional lines, may be found in "Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917", which was published after Eliot's death.

Answer: Ezra Pound

The poem is 140 lines long, and its publication was aided by Ezra Pound, who was an overseas editor of "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse". In November 1915, the poem was included with four other Eliot poems in the "Catholic Anthology 1914-1915," which was also edited by Pound. Pound helped to develop the Imagism movement, which stresses precision and clarity in language, and is the author of "Ripostes" and "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley".

Answer: Rudyard Kipling

T.S. Eliot's address to the Kipling Society, "The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling," was published in the March 1959 "Kipling Journal." In this address, he admits that the influence of Kipling appears throughout his own poetry. Of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", Eliot said, "it would never have been called 'Love Song' but for a title of Kipling's that stuck obstinately in my head: 'The Love Song of Har Dyal.'"

Answer: hotels

"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels."

From the harsh medical simile of the poem's opening lines, the reader is already alerted that this will be no romantic poem.

The poem was not initially received well by all in the literary world. An unsigned review in "Literary World" on July 5, 1917 opined, "Mr. Eliot is one of those clever young men who find it amusing to pull the leg of a sober reviewer. We can imagine his saying to his friends: 'See me have a lark out of the old fogies who don't know a poem from a pea-shooter. I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'.'"

Answer: a tedious argument

"Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent."

These detailed images paint a haunting picture of loneliness. Not all reviewers felt that way in Eliot's time, however. An unsigned review in "The Times Literary Supplement" on June 21 1917 said, "Mr. Eliot's notion of poetry - he calls the 'observations' poems - seems to be a purely analytical treatment, verging sometimes on the catalogue, of personal relations and environments, uninspired by any glimpse beyond them and untouched by any genuine rush of feeling."

Answer: drains

Here, the yellow fog, also called the yellow smoke in the next line, is personified, given human features as it muzzles and licks its tongue.

In his March 1970 article "A Structural Dantean Parallel in Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'" in "American Literature", Eugene Hollahan points out that this poem's structure was inspired by Eliot's extensive reading of the 13th century poet Dante Alighieri. The epigraph to the poem even comes from from Canto 27 of Dante's "Inferno". It's spoken by a character in the 8th circle of hell, which opens the poem with a sense of being trapped and not really able to go anywhere, despite the narrator's opening desire, "Let us go then, you and I..."

Answer: universe

"For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?"

Prufrock has an overwhelming question on his heart, but those around him seem uninterested in anything but shallow, surface things, and he cannot bring himself to "disturb the universe" by bringing up deeper matters. This poem paints a picture of a man who is desperate for meaning in a modern world that seems empty of meaning.

Answer: John the Baptist

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the story of how John the Baptist, a prophet and herald of Jesus, rebuked Herod, a tetrarch of Galilee during the Roman Empire, for divorcing his wife and taking Herodias, the wife of his brother. On Herodias' birthday, her daughter Salome danced before Herod and his guests, and Herod liked it so much, that he promised to give her anything she asked for, up to half his kingdom. Salome conferred with her mother, and then asked for the head of John the Baptist to be brought in on a platter. (Salome's name is not given in the Bible but is drawn from the history written by Josephus.)

Eliot makes another allusions to the Bible when he refers to the raising of Lazarus:

"Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'"

Answer: Prince Hamlet

"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous-
Almost, at times, the Fool."

The fool here may be Polonious in Shakespeare's "Hamlet". This is not the only Shakespearean allusion Eliot makes in this poem. His "dying fall" from line 52 echoes a line of Shakespeare in "Twelfth Night," when Duke Orsino asks his musicians to repeat a bit of music because "it had a dying fall."