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Eliot's THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK.(poet T.S. Eliot)(Critical Essay)(Brief Article)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 19940622
Author:BLYTHE, HAL; SWEET, CHARLIE

Prufrock's desire to be a "pair of ragged claws," in Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," has left critics awash on a sea of interpretations. The Norton Anthology of English Literature call Prufrock's wish an allusion to Hamlet, the motion of the crab suggesting "futility and growing old" (1469). Fleissner traces the reference to Lydgate's "So as the Crabbe Goth Forward," claiming it connotes prudential "scuttling" in society (248). Smith believes that Eliot uses the image to symbolize Prufrock's "tentative, at-a-distance sexual desire, easily frustrated, often ...

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