The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock

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Originally Posted by Bazooka

I would be fascinated to hear your support for your claims of Eliot's anti-semitism, racism, and misogyny based on "The Wasteland."


Eliot was anti-semitic and racist, although I don't believe either are evident in Prufrock or Wasteland. I don't recall ever seeing anything misogynist.

We shouldn't stop reading Eliot for his debased views. But we should know of them. And it will be a disgrace on his character for eternity. But there are good points to his character too, so let's take the full measure of the man.

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Eliot was not a anti-semite, such statements are much too general and are generally blatant regurgitations of what other critics have said, and we have read. I will quote Wikipedia here, not that the source is above reproach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot

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Charges of anti-Semitism

Eliot has sometimes been charged with anti-Semitism. Biographer Lyndall Gordon has noted that many in Eliot's milieu successfully eschewed such views.[43]

[edit] Public expressions

The poem "Gerontion" contains a depiction of a landlord referred to only as the "Jew [who] squats on the window sill." Another much-quoted example is the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar", in which a character in the poem implicitly blames the Jews for the decline of Venice ("The rats are underneath the piles/ The Jew is underneath the lot"). In "A Cooking Egg", Eliot writes, "The red-eyed scavengers are creeping/ From Kentish Town and Golder's Green" (Golders Green was a largely Jewish suburb of London).

In a series of lectures given at the University of Virginia in 1933 and later published under the title "After Strange Gods" (1934), Eliot said, regarding a homogeneity of culture (and implying a traditional Christian community), "What is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."[44] The philosopher George Boas, who had previously been on friendly terms with Eliot, wrote to him that, "I can at least rid you of the company of one." Eliot did not reply. In later years Eliot disavowed the book, and refused to allow any part to be reprinted.

Eliot also wrote a letter to the Daily Mail in January 1932 which congratulated the paper for a series of laudatory articles on the rise of Mussolini. In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) he says "…totalitarianism can retain the terms 'freedom' and 'democracy' and give them its own meaning: and its right to them is not so easily disproved as minds inflamed by passion suppose." In the same book, written before World War II, he says of J. F. C. Fuller, who worked for the Policy Directorate in the British Union of Fascists:

Fuller… believes that Britain "must swim with the out-flowing tide of this great political change". From my point of view, General Fuller has as good a title to call himself a "believer in democracy" as anyone else. …I do not think I am unfair to [the report that a ban against married women Civil Servants should be removed because it embodied Nazism], in finding the implication that what is Nazi is wrong, and need not be discussed on its own merits.[45]

[edit] Protests against

One of the first and most famous protests against T. S. Eliot on the subject of anti-Semitism came in the form of a poem from the Anglo-Jewish writer and poet Emanuel Litvinoff,[46] at an inaugural poetry reading for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951. Only a few years after the Holocaust, Eliot had republished lines originally written in the 1920s about 'money in furs' and the 'protozoic slime' of Bleistein's 'lustreless, protrusive eye' in his Selected Poems of 1948, angering Litvinoff. When the poet got up and announced his poem, entitled 'To T. S. Eliot', the event’s host, Sir Herbert Read, declared 'Oh Good, Tom's just come in’. Litvinoff proceeded in evoking to the packed but silent room his work, which ended with the lines "Let your words/tread lightly on this earth of Europe/lest my people's bones protest". Many members of the audience were outraged; Litvinoff said "hell broke loose" and that no one supported him. One listener, the poet Stephen Spender, claiming to be as Jewish as Litvinoff, stood and called the poem an undeserved attack on Eliot.[46] However, Litvinoff says that Eliot was heard to mutter, 'It's a good poem'.[47]

[edit] Rebuttals

Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, who was himself Jewish and a friend of Eliot's, judged that Eliot was probably "slightly anti-Semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would have denied it quite genuinely."[48] Jewish friends such as Stephen Spender, Isaiah Berlin, Sidney Schiff, and Norbert Weiner claimed that they had no basis on which to believe that Eliot was anti-semitic.

In 2003, Professor Ronald Schuchard of Emory University published details of a previously unknown cache of letters from Eliot to Horace Kallen, which reveal that in the early 1940s Eliot was actively helping Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria to re-settle in Britain and America. In letters written after the war, Eliot also voiced support for modern Israel.[49]

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Eliot was not beyond a contemporaneous thought "trend", which sought to repurify a miserably failing society. Fascism, communism, naziism, all sought in their way to homogenize societies into a more functional, governable, economically viable civilization. The Jews--as well as other groups deeply rooted in old cultural practices--being a distinct social group within a larger group, threatened homogeneity. As seen through history, large social groups weed out subgroups that appear to threaten the political, economic, intelligence goals of the group. The subgroup is a common scapegoat. It's like society consumes the part of itself considered to be stagnant. (Ironically, "society" is controlled by the few.) Every time society is steered in a new direction the subgroups more trenchant in their own traditions are likely to be viewed as a threat. A very old subgroup such as the Jewish usually gets attacked repetitively through history because they are a subgroup, and there appears to be an historical precedent of blaming them as a subgroup.

Eliot, firstly a poet, forced to be a member of a fickle society, very clinically depressed, a lover of humans, a hater of humanity, a weary hopeful, starer into the distance wanted a better world. The fact that he references the Jews as a subgroup in conflict with the aims of homogeneity (which with a revolutionary artistic desire truly aimed to shape humanity into a doable thing according to the logic of the age) does not make him anti-semitic. It makes him a parrhesiast.

I'm not defending genocide, murder, or harm of any type. I'm not defending racism. I'm not promoting totalitarianism disguised as purification of social ideals (ahem...corpo-USA). As far as the misogyny charges against him, Eliot was an equal hater of all people as much as he hated himself.

Prufrock: sad, fatal, weary, weird

Here an Israeli commentator warns of pogroms coming in America in response to Jewish participation in liberal movements. A curious read.
http://samsonblinded.org/blog/on-ant...in-america.htm

I think you're right about the pretentiousness - J Alfred Prufrock - odd way to describe yourself unless you were doing it for effect. He frets about his bald spot, and that mock heroic pair of claws. The beginning of the poem shows its sickness - "like a patient etherised upon a table", before he goes on to describe the dingy streets and fog.

I don't think you can draw conclusions about Eliot so much from the poem, but he is certainly commenting upon the social sterility whilst measuring out life in coffee spoons.

It's a great poem.

Just some random thoughts: I always thought that Prufrock represents the repressed Englishman, with a guilt about his sexual desires and appetites and a mind body dualism, a loathing of the flesh, a cleric, or vicarious persona through whom Eliot relates the agony of modern man, his angst, and his existential anguish. Its also an example of the attitude Eliot held towards Christianity that was against the dilution of belief in the liberal era as he held Conservative views on morality and had a deep ant-semitism at this time. Prufrock attends religious retreats, his 'toast and tea' are the Angliscised body and blood of Christ and are domesticised into mundanity, the sacraments of confession in Prufrock's visit and a baptism at the end are also invoked.

Eliot had begun to think that two thousand years (almost) of Christianity has instilled values such as humility and charity at the expense of courage, the poem is deeply influenced by Nietchze's ideas about a Superman and Prufrock's lack of this make's renders him as timid, Prufrock is created from without, by the opinions of others and through institutions, his body being bound by the knowldege of aging and death.

This poem is filled with paradoxes, another one is that Prufrock is an irony of evolution, evolution which has created a being who can comprehend his own finiteness and limits and his complete isolation in the universe.

Prufrock is a timid, utilitarian individual, roaming the labyrinthine lamplit streets of the city at night looking for cheap thrills and attempting to lose himself, with a cheap attitude towards women that could be viewed as ranging from exploitative to homosexual.

For me, this poem moves forward like the reels from old cinematic films at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, it could almost be set to ragtime, indeed the poem has a laconic musical tone it has borrowed from the Symbolists. Let's not forget this poem is a love song, but its not sung to Prufrock himself, he senses his inferiority and acceptance of this.

Whether Eliot intended for the poem to rush forth like a modern movie I don't know as his attitude to modern technology in the poem seems sceptical, the nerves thrown upon the wall line is a dig at cinema and the separation of the self in front of a screen, as though lived experience is being cut off, and Prufrock is the victim, of this and the telephone too in the image of the shell.

Prufrock is also a specimen of the modern field of psychology, a man separated from, but determined by the flaws in his subconscious, determined by environmental, genetic, and tribal factors with primitive desires concealed, beneath the surface and primitive signs and symbols act as signifiers throughout the poem. The stream of consciousness serves to reveal Prufrock's mentality and his lonely dialogue, the idea of language itself being examined as Prufrock is separated from his language and cannot express himself, the idea of meaning itself therefore also being considered.

Let us go then you and I signifies that the character believes that there is always someone present, God perhaps?The references to Michelangelo pointing to the Vatican and Christianity and the implication being that it could simply be a fraud, and Prufrock deceives himself, interiorising his problems, his consciousness a deceit with an existential dilemma like Hamlet, only for Prufrock such grandeur is never possible.

This fragemetation of the person and the poetic structure could be likened to a Cubist painting popular at the same time. Cubism offers the viewer or reader multiple viewpoints from which to view the character. The perspective of the Renaissance in which man was placed by Humanists at the centre of the universe is shattered by the Modernists who displace not only God from the centre of the universe but also man. In this of course is the Modernist view of aesthetics and the move from Christianity and Western civilization to the 'other' and Non Western and therefore the degenerate non classical and romantic which in Eliot's view has ruined western civilisation

:lurk5:Of course, I don't pretend to understand the physics but Einstein's theory of relativity was also influential on Prufrock. Science was telling society that everything is relative not absolute as classical science and theology taught, and Prufrock inhabits a relativist universe, his consciousness is relative and unfolds throughout the progression of the poem as he 'progresses.' I say progresses because Prufrock is the product of the Nineteenth century idea of 'progress' and Eliot's disillusion with it. Progress is contingent upon time, and the poem unfolds its dimensions become concurrent with Prufrock's understanding of time, he says 'there will be time', Modernism and its artists were very influenced by Henri Bergson and his notions of time, {Time and free will}. For Prufrock time and the ageing process represent decay, his consciousness being revealed in nervy interludes and interrupted and gnomic statements, Prufrock's identity unfolds like a newspaper, the symbolism being similar to Cubist painters' use of newspapers in collage like portrayals, this illustrating the way in which the modern media, in this case the printing press and mass news paper industry, have become a significant part of the human psyche and has invaded our understanding of society and events around us. Language and its effect on culture is mediated through the media and this has left Prufrock feeling that he cannot make himself understood, his language is deeply interiorised, yet exposed he dare not 'presume'. Mass popular culture which Eliot despised has invaded P's persona making a mockery of the 'Love Song' aspect of the poem, instead of classical verse this poem is broken up, shattered, and fragmented, just like Prufrock's speech and identity, I don't speak Italian, but its clear that the reference to Dante's Inferno, is in addition to the influence of Marvell, Donne and Elizabethan poetry indicated in the poem. Of course in poets of the late Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century man and nature are often in synthesis, whereas in this poem the setting opens with an 'evening set out against the sky.' Prufrock's alienation separating him from nature and his perception is diminished and anaesthetised 'like a patient undergoing a terrible operation.

Eliot's scepticism about the impact of modern technology and modern culture after the cataclysm of the great war is clear, the effect of technology on consciousness is suggested by the magic lantern, clearly an allusion to the cinema which throws P's nerves up the wall.
Add this to the dreamlike state of the poem and P's statements [probably borrowed from the Symbolist movement] smothered in yellow fog of modern pollution in the city, referring to the 90's fin de siecle and the general tawdriness that Eliot feels exists. Prufrock's social interaction in these conditions in which he visits brothels depicts the decadence of the human condition, which has been stratified into reductionist manners. Social interaction is played out by Prufrock's loneliness and isolation as he treads the streets that are named like a 'tedious argument' - rows of streets cramming in the labouring classes with such density creating fractiousness, indeed eyes, arms, legs and hair are all mentioned as if existing independently and randomly and not unified into coherent selves, as Prufrock treads the streets he only see's partial people from his partial relative self cut off from nature.

The poem is of course ultimately an ironic suggestion of Eliot's own insecurity and his personality as a young man, a confession and suggestive of his mental breakdown which is transposed into Prufrock's disconnectedness.

I think it's interesting to speculate how much Prufrock embodies some of Eliot's own thoughts, feelings, experiences and his relationships with women, especially with his first wife Viv. Perhaps Eliot dithered about asking her to marry him, he certainly treated her badly as she descended into mental illness. For traditionalists like Eliot marriage is the nucleus of society, but his own marriage was far from perfect and Prufrock's indecisiveness about the 'overwhelming question' he cannot bear to ask could represent Eliot's uncertainty about marriage and sticking to its vows.

Eliot was a traditionalist, but also a modernist poet and ahead of his time, how Prufrock represents the modern church, 'Prudish Frock' being a cleric who can conduct marriage ceremonies but who has issues with sex and marriage. Eliot's scepticism about Christianity's effect on male vigour is obvious. Priests in the Roman Catholic church cannot marry whilst gay clerics cannot marry either, so the poem comes to foreshadow the modern debate in the churches about human sexuality.

Churches are, all about symbols and the poem is very similar to that modernist movement called Surrealism, in which symbols are portrayed buried in the unconscious, the dreamlike state evokes Prufrock's consciousness, particular words stand out metaphorically as symbols buried in language just as symbols in churches lodge ideas in the mind. Prufrock's dialogue, is very similar to the Structuralist view.

Eliot married Viv in a registry office, but as he aged he became more religious, his Unitarianism became Anglicanism and then Anglo Catholic, by the time of Little Gidding he had become British. I think that Prufrock which was published in 1915 is heavily influenced by the young Eliot's aversions and arrogance, his timidity, and his uneasy relationship to the opposite sex. By the time of 'Little Gidding' in the 40's, Eliot had moved away from anticlericalism and antisemitism too and embraced mystical Christianity, perhaps the rise of the Nazis made him feel that way I don't know.