In this poem Prufrock continuously speaking to the audience accompanied by some imaginations...
Eliot first achieves the extinction of his personality by setting "Prufrock" in the poetic form of a dramatic monologue. In this form, the speaker addresses another person and the reader plays the part of the silent listener; often the dramatic monologue is freighted with irony, as the speaker is partially unaware of what he reveals. Robert Browning, the undisputed master of the dramatic monologue, exploited this possibility in his most famous dramatic monologue, "My Last Duchess"; the reader learns much about the Duke that he has not intended to expose.
The dramatic monologue fell out of fashion in 20th-century Modernism after its 19th-century Victorian invention. Eliot was a great believer in the historical value of art; in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," he argued that "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past," especially the literary past.
Gradesaver
