Relationship of The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock to Its Art Forms Anonymous College

In T.S. Elliot’s poem The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, the author utilizes the structure of the Victorian dramatic monologue to give voice to Prufrock, a man who spends his allotted lines questioning both himself and the world around him. In shaping Prufrock’s world, Elliot references the high art that he was surrounded by and himself enjoyed. In doing so, he alludes to both theatre and literature as art forms from the Italian and English Renaissance, incorporating Dante’s Inferno, Michelangelo and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. These allusions help shape the tone of the poem, as Elliot employs great art of the past as examples of the shallow society Prufrock feels surrounds him, and his inconsequential nature within it. These allusions shed light on the changing world, and ultimately suggest that modernism is incapable of producing comparable art forms.

In the opening lines of Prufrock, Elliot begins with a quote from Dante’s Inferno, where he references the speaker’s conversation with a man he meets in hell. When Dante, the speaker, asks the man, Guido da Montefeltro, to tell him the story of how he came to be in hell, Guido answers that he will do so only because he knows the story will never see the light of day in the mortal...