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T. S. EliotA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Written by one of the most prominent figures of modernism, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” defined the early movement. Characterized by a break with previous generations’ romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, modernist poetry often made use of free verse, collage, dense cultural allusions, vernacular language, and other experimental poetic elements. Emerging in the wake of World War I with the onslaught of new technologies and modes of communication, modernism often espoused a profoundly negative or pessimistic view of the contemporary world, rejecting the notion of a stable, loving, or ordered world in favor of something depersonalized and amoral with unstable values and a lack of human connection.
Eliot believed that no poet could escape the influence of past writers and artists—an idea he explicates further in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). With “Prufrock,” Eliot situates his poem in a long literary tradition, stretching from the Bible to Dante—who he invokes from the beginning of the poem—to Shakespeare, and to Robert Browning, who also wrote a great deal of dramatic monologues. The richness of reference and
By T. S. Eliot
Ash Wednesday
T. S. Eliot
East Coker
T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets
T. S. Eliot
Journey of the Magi
T. S. Eliot
Little Gidding
T. S. Eliot
Mr. Mistoffelees
T. S. Eliot
Murder in the Cathedral
T. S. Eliot
Portrait of a Lady
T. S. Eliot
Preludes
T. S. Eliot
Rhapsody On A Windy Night
T. S. Eliot
The Cocktail Party
T. S. Eliot
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
The Song of the Jellicles
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot
Tradition and the Individual Talent
T. S. Eliot