A Fault View at Prufrock

"Let us go then you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised on a table;"

- T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred "Prufrock" published in 1918. 

These 3 lines at the beginning of the poem followed by an Epigraph from Dante's inferno can looked at as the beginning of the modernist movement. The use of the fancy (in Coleridge's words) of walking into the evening sky which is then subverted by the cold line which aptly makes you numb. 

Romanticism was still around when the poem was written and practiced. However times for Romanticism were slowly fading away. There was competition for good poetry from the Victorians that followed them and the prospect of the first World War made it so that the world couldn't be looked at in terms of pleasure and greater spiritual endeavours.

T.S. Eliot can be classified as a modernist. The modernist sentiment of making so that poetry scares and terrifies was a sentiment was in direct contrast to the Romantics' pursuit of imparting pleasure. This subversion had the shock factor but what made it stand out was the breaking away from tradition.

Gone was the age of rhymes, meter, repeating stanza structure and templates that were prevalent in English poetry. All that left was a fragmented lines which reflected the state of mind people where in. This made it so that the poetry was much harder to understand but the meaning was amplified by multiple allusions to older works and the notion of breaking down icons of culture, literature and presenting things with grave reality and almost a sense of nihilism. 

This poem is mainly about a person who is medicore and tries to find solace in present by examining the past for figures in Literature but realises that there is peace to found because the past is soo detached from the present. 

There are multiple more ideas and interpretations that the poem can take this makes it so that this poem can be read continuously and come out with something new or add onto something that already exists.

Play this game if you'd like.

https://amuselabs.com/pmm/crossword?id=8f527d6c&set=8cecd4dcb2fe015f42b865194b1e51e3a5fe47fee68c9531d5083e7f378c0f84