T. S Elliots 'La figlia che piange' + 'Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock' Flashcards
Explain key info/context on TS Elliot
T.S Elliot seems to constantly express aesthetic and asetheticability + sensitivity as having no real place in the modern world.
This a realistic, anti-romantic outlook. In nihilistically breaking with everything from the past T.S Elliot was by definition an anti-romantic.
State T.S Elliot’s poems
- La Figlia Che Piange
- The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock:
What is Elliots La Figlia Che Piange centred around?
The poem is an epic poem surrounding the fact that the speaker is not interested in participating in love himself, but rather in observing its perfection. He does what he can to create the perfect image of beauty. Elliot describes a speaker’s attempt to craft the perfect, yet tragic, love story.
State how Elliot constructs La Figlia Che Piange
In this section of the epic poem, Aeneas is addressing his mother, the goddess Venus. He is professing his desire to remain free of any complicated romantic attachments.
The poem begins with the speaker asking a female figure in his narrative to complete a variety of actions. The speaker has a very clear idea of what she should look like and do.
Its incredibly authoritative and somewhat creepy from a modern perspective but hes interested purely in the observable + the perfection of the male gaze not within admiring her because he adores her he adores her aesthetic + commanding her as he pleases.
The speaker is unable to get this woman out of his head. He spends all his time imagining her grief and what steps she would take after the man’s departure. Perhaps they could’ve come back together. If this was the case, her hair would be “over her arms” and she’d get to hold bouquets of flowers. There would be an abundance of love and its representational elements. He is enthralled by the idea of what the two could’ve been like together.
In the final lines, he states how these thoughts remain with him no matter the time of day. The surface in his mind at the “troubled midnight” or at midday when he is trying to relax.
What is The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock centred around?
It’s the inner monologue of a city gentleman who is stricken by feelings of isolation and inadequacy and incapability of taking decisive action.
It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man—overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted.
Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to “force the moment to its crisis” by somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to “dare” an approach to the woman
The epigraph to this poem, from Dante’s Inferno, describes Prufrock’s ideal listener: one who is as lost as the speaker and will never betray to the world the content of Prufrock’s present confessions.
State the key poetic devices Elliot utilises within The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Rhyme scheme is irregular but not random. While sections of the poem may resemble free verse, in reality, “Prufrock” is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic forms. The bits and pieces of rhyme become much more apparent when the poem is read aloud. One of the most prominent formal characteristics of this work is the use of refrains.
- Refrains
- Repetition
- Similes
- Personnification
- Enjambment.
- Fragmentation
- Juxtaposition
- Series of Metonyms,
What is the significance of Elliots use of Fragmentation within The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock?
Fragmentation is a Modernist technique that had not since been seen before in literature and was probably not very well received by the literary elite’s high circle. Modernist poets and writers believed that their artistry should mirror the chaotic world they lived in; seldom is meaning, in the real world, parcelled up and handed over in whole parts.
Fragmentation is a defining charteristsic of the poem + Eliot sustained his interest in fragmentation and its applications throughout his career.Here, the subjects undergoing fragmentation (and reassembly) are mental focus and certain sets of imagery.
Possible meanings behind this fragmentation;
- The fragmentation of the cat could symbolize the fragmentation of Prufrock’s psyche, the very schism that is leading him to have this conversation, his hope of risk, and his terror of risking his interest in women, and his terror of them. Much like the cat, Prufrock is on the outside looking in at a world that has not been prepared for him.
- Fragmentation can also be applied to the earlier reference to “the women,” which are not really described in any way but are instead considered by the sum of their parts in conversation – they only exist because they are “talking of Michelangelo.”
- Fragmentation as a process provides a broken-in society, a patchwork view of humanity that only serves to populate the poem with more emptiness. Prufrock’s distance from contemporary society reflects itself in this fragmentation; he reduces people to the sum of their parts, and thus by doing so, empties the world of others.
How is the discontent over the transiency of time + life presented by Elliot within The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock?
Elliot conveys an emptiness of the world: “oyster-shells,” “sawdust restaurants”; everything is impermanent; everything is about to dissolve into nothing. The world is transitory, half-broken, unpopulated, and about to collapse.
At a half-second glance at a world that seems largely unpopulated. Note that he does not mention anyone else in the poem, lending it an air of post-apocalyptic silence.
However, it is left ambiguous whether it is the world that is actually this way or Prufrock’s miserable nature that is painting it in such a manner.
It holds a very anti-romantic perception.
