The love song

I would say he is articulate but has low self-esteem. While it would appear, then, that T. Stearns Eliot was using J. Alfred Prufrock as an alter ego to explore his own emotions, this is not the case. Superficial differences aside - Eliot was a young man in 1909, while Prufrock is balding and probably middle-aged - Eliot disdained poetry that focused on the poet himself. He wrote in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the "progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." He crystallized his ideas about how to achieve this extinction of personality in another essay, "Hamlet and His Problems": "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion." Simply put, the objective correlative - a tangible, concrete thing - assumes the emotional significance in a work of art; Eliot largely does away with abstract emotional ruminations. The examples and ramifications of the objective correlative in "Prufrock" will be discussed later.