11 Facts About Prufrock

At the time of its publication, Prufrock was considered outlandish, but is seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th-century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.

Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers.

Pound served as the overseas editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and recommended to the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe, that Poetry publish "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock", extolling that Eliot and his work embodied a new and unique phenomenon among contemporary writers.

However, the origin of the name Prufrock is not certain, and Eliot never remarked on its origin other than to claim he was unsure of how he came upon the name.

Prufrock finally decided not to use this, but eventually used the quotation in the closing lines of his 1922 poem The Waste Land.

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Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from a split personality of sorts, and that he embodies both Guido and Dante in the Inferno analogy.

Prufrock posits, alternatively, that the role of Guido in the analogy is indeed filled by Prufrock, but that the role of Dante is filled by the reader .

The dispute lies in to whom Prufrock is speaking, whether he is actually going anywhere, what he wants to say, and to what the various images refer.

Some believe that Prufrock is talking to another person or directly to the reader, while others believe Prufrock's monologue is internal.

Many believe that Prufrock is trying to tell a woman of his romantic interest in her, pointing to the various images of women's arms and clothing and the final few lines in which Prufrock laments that the mermaids will not sing to him.

Many believe that the poem is a criticism of Edwardian society and Prufrock's dilemma represents the inability to live a meaningful existence in the modern world.