Surrealism and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Surrealism is a dangerous word to use about the poet, dramatist and critic T.S. Eliot, and certainly with his head start major work, The rage form of J. Alfred Prufrock . Eliot wrote the poem, after all, years before Andre Breton and his compatriots began defining and practicing surrealism proper. Andre Breton published his first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, seven years after Eliots publication of The have sex Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It was this manifesto which defined the movement in philosophical and psycho logical terms. Moreover, Eliot would later show indifference, incomprehension and at times repulsion toward surrealism and its precursor Dada.

        Eliots favourites among his French contemporaries werent surrealists, but were rather the figures of St. bottom Perse and Paul Verlaine, among others. This does non mean Eliot had nothing in third estate with surrealist poetry, but the facts that both Eliot and the Surrealists owed much to Charles Baudelaires can perhaps better(p) explain any similarity strangely evocative explorations of the symbolic suggestions of objects and images. Its unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions often characterize surrealism, by which it tries to transcend logic and habitual thinking, to reveal deeper levels of meaning and of unconscious associations.



Although scholars might not classify Eliot as a Surrealist, the surreal landscape, defined as an attempt to express the workings of the subconscious mind by images without vow, as in a dream is exemplified in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

        Prufrock presents a symbolic landscape where the meaning emerges from the unwashed interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged by echoes, often heroic, of other writers.

The juxtapositions mentioned earlier are evident even at the poems opening, which begins on a rather sombre note, with a nightmarish passing game from Dantes Inferno. The main character, Guido de Montefeltro, confesses his sins...

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