Oh, Do not ask, What is it? in Eliots The Lovesong of J.

Alfred Prufrock And Gerontion I

His was the true Dantescan voicenot honoured enough, and deserving more than I ever gave him. -Ezra Pound

The aforementioned lines by Modernist Ezra Pounds that aptly and concisely sums up the absolutely astonishing style of T.S Eliot, draws nods of approval from his rather baffled readers, students of literature in particular. Eliot, along with Ezra Pound and James Joyce were the leading figures of the modernist movement in Europe, spanning 1910-1930 and were collectively referred to as the Men of 1914. i He was extremely influential amongst the modernist thinkers and his work, The Waste Land is one of the many canonized. His style and technique and his solemnly morbid mood of poetry makes for a greatly innovative combination, and his classicism, formalism, along with mundane-ism made for a strangely exhilarating existentialist angst that effectively transmitted to the readers. Eliot has alternatively been described as the most individual of contemporary poets, and one of the most traditionalii. Critic S.S Sharma has commented that Eliot was a classicist by temper and was against romantic exuberance and emotionalism. He was for order, restraint, formalism. Indeed, theres a sense of an acute, despairing, melancholic and brooding awareness of the changing world order, pervading his works. As a modernist, he sought to depict the breakage and fissures in continuity, in his works. For Modernism was essentially the movement towards sophistication, and mannerism, towards introversion, technical display, and internal self skepticism. It was also about such kind of modern ideas, thoughts, techniques, and experimental ways of representation. The early half of the nineteenth century was marked by several wars and revolutions which made people disillusioned with the ideologies, politics and society of that age. It also made them inclined towards Romanticism. Critics Malcolm Bradbury and James Mcfarlane have commented that Modernism has often been used analogously with Romanticism, to suggest at the general temper of the twentieth century arts. Modernism has also been seen as the late bourgeois aesthetics, which Marxists like Lukacs say are the species of realism. Modernism therefore seems to be the essential marker, or a record of the process of evolution in the literary and artistic field. Furthermore, it was pointed out that Like Romanticism, it was a revolutionary movement, capitalizing on a vast intellectual readjustment and radical dissatisfaction with the artistic past. And in a world fraught with such tension and agonizing wreckage, Eliot stood for the restoration of orderas pointed out by Cleanth Books, and toward the restoration of order that poetry alone perhaps can

give. Brooks also says that Eliots poetry arose out of a mental and spiritual activity and his poetry mostly rather, made use of the modernist style of stream of consciousness. Eliot was however against typical romanticist techniques of self-expression, and was in favor of a poetry that was severe and classical.iii Critic Conrad Aiken comments that Eliot, more than most poets, is conscious of his roots. And if his consciousness had not become acute in The Lovesong, it was nevertheless still there for it was French and dated, 1870-1900. The sense of his past was extremely pressing and he was maddeningly preoccupied with it. But it seems he was repositioning these roots- drawing inspiration from Donne and Webster, a faded gilt of cynicism and formality from the Restoration. II Ezra Pound has said, He (Eliot) has not confined himself to genre or society portraiture. His lonely men in shirts-sleeves leaning out of the windows are real as his ladies who come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo. F.R Leavis says, We have, in short, poetry that expresses feely a modern sensibility, the ways of feeling, the modes of experience, of one fully alive in his own age. Already the technical achievement is such as to be rich in promise of development and application. Modernism was the point at which the idea of the radical and innovating arts, the experimental, the technical, aesthetic ideal that has been growing forward from romanticism, reaches its formal crisis in which tradition, structure and from collapses completely. It is a situation of unbridled chaos, tumult, lack of restraint in the face of industrial and material advancement, scientific progress and war politics, causing existential despair. Several theorists like Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Fredrich Neitzsche and writers like Virginia Woolf, E.M Forster, and Joseph Conrad have also been a part of this movement. Eliot had greatly admired Baudillaire and Eliots style was very similar to his idol. Eliot took inspiration from him in his depiction on the city life. Critic Manju Jain has pointed out that the example of Baudilaire was important to Eliot not merely in the use of imagery of the sordid life of a great metropolis, but more significantly, in the elevation of such imager to the first intensitypresenting I as it is, and yet making it represent something much more than itself. Critic Wallace Fowlie has commented that for Eliot, Baudillaire was more than just a poet. He was the maker of an important attitude, an outlook, and outlook of the disorder he saw everywhere. Moreover, both nurtured the impassioned plan to rediscover authentic human values, and to oppose those forms of stagnation which in each generation man invents for his own misery., Fowlie also points out. This misery was part of the modernist tradition. The nature of selfhood and consciousness, the alienation of the artist from the world and society, the liberality in language, a certain nostalgia with the past and anguish at the collapsing system of beliefs, were too. But most importantly, the self became the centre of contemplation for the modernists. Eliots poems depict this kind of obsession with the self; a kind of self-consciousness, especially in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock is extremely conscious of his aging body; his bald

spot in the middle of my hair and his inability to strike a conversation with the women talking of Michelangelo. And also, I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. and I grow oldI grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Moreover, his state of consciousness stands frozen and he has become socially inept. He is unable to fit in: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a atble; Let us go, through half-deserted streets Etherized could refer to ether which is a sedative drug can mean Ethereal which means intangible ad beautiful. The comparison between the sky and the etherized man is symbolic of Prufrocks clouded consciousness. The an overwhelming question is the question that Prufrock is unable to ask because of the frozen consciousness and the lack of self-esteem. The question is a proposal question to be asked to a lady and is also the question of life and society; existentialist questions. This question haunts him, he wishes to posit it, but procrastinates saying, There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet Time for you and time for me/ And time for a hundred visions and revisions. He is also unable to tell the truth: Though I have seen my head(grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,/I am not prophet- and heres no matter. He admits: And in short, I was afraid. There is gloom about the surroundings, particularly the hum-drum of city life that overwhelms him: Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious retreat and The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes. The yellow fog is the haze caused by chimney smoke and factory pollution of the city. The jaundiced image is reminiscent of the gloomy towns of Dickens novels. The feeling of uncertainty and doubt and the tendency to post-pone permeates the poem: And indeed there will be time To wonder, Do I dare? and, Do I dare? Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair The issue of self-identity is also crucial over here. Prufrock says, No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be, suggesting a loss of self identity and self worth and also the realization that the comical figure of Prufrock will never become like Hamlet. When finally he says, Till human voices wake us, and we drown, he is still submerged in despair and hopelessness. And even if he feels awakened by drowning in love, reality, his life will be as bad. This desolation is carried forward in Gerontion in which a much older man than Prufrock talks about the worldly matters more than his own, and how old values and traditions were breaking up causing chaos. Personal problems are disregarded over the general human plight.

Critic Manju Jain comments saying, Gerontion too is acutely self-conscious. Caught between conscience and doubt, his will is paralysed and he can believe in nothing. Its like, I am an old man/ a dull head among windy spaces. There is a sense of modernist regret and defeat as he says, Nor faught in the warm rain/ Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass/ Bitten by flies I faught. He goes on to say, My house is a decayed house, which implies that the human body is but an impermanent entity that is the refuge of the soul Also, Gerontions failure is both a spiritual and erotic one. There is a close interconnection in the poem between historical and carnal knowledge in this year, and between religious and erotic experiences. The darkness and gloominess is present in an extremely poem are brought out very beautifully: Swaddled with darkness which is a Biblical allusion which alludes to the fact that when Christ was born and was wrapped in a blanket of ignorance. The poet truly starved of intellectual people to converse with on intelligent matters sometimes. Pessimism and negativity, failure and demolishing of older values resonates in the following passage as well: Think Neither fear nor courage saves. Unnaturally vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. The reference of the names that have occurred it seems as if to the nervous, displaced, cosmopolitans. The entire poem seems to be a poem of lamentation more than anything else. Especially due to the changing landscape that generated a sense of nostalgia and depression in people. Critic Manju Jain commented that in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, Prufrocks personality is fragmented, not because there is a schism between his social self and the buried, inner life of emotions. Prufrock serves as the mouthpiece of many; the anti-hero, the character meant for ridicule, is extremely significant especially with relation to his laughable name. His voice, situation and actions reflect Eliots preoccupation with the self, for at every step, the character of Prufrock appears to be fragmented and incoherent. Gerontion too displays such modernist morbidity. Its epigraph that is taken from Shakespeares Measure for Measure, and the words are the ones spoken by the disguised Duke to Claudio, a young man sentenced to death:Though hast nor youth nor age/ But as it were after dinner sleep/ Dreaming of both. While these words were spoken to exhort Claudio to take death as it came for life and death were both inevitable, these lines are aptly suited in this poem for they seem to be directed towards Genrontion. Gernontion himself ponders upon the futility of life. Critic Manju Jain says, Gernontions personality mediates upon the paralyzing consequences of the alienation of his mind from his body His monologue is filled with self-dramatization and self-deception. Eliot is one of the few poets who are the creators of such great modernist verses. Critic Hugh Kenner comments that Eliot deals in effects, not ideas; and the effects are in an odd way wholly verbal, seemingly endemic to the language There is a kind of audacity in his poems that strikes wondrous.

The very emotion of the author is laid bare for all to savor. BIBLIOGRAPHY Kenner, Hugh, Prufrock, Pound, Ezra, Confound it, The Fellow Can Write Jain, Manju, Introduction, Selected Works of T.S Eliot, Sharma, S.S, Introduction, T.S Eliot Selection of Poems Ayers, David, Modernism, Atlantic Publishers, 1960 Aiken, Conrad, The Anatomy of Melancholy, T.S Eliot, Chatto and Windus London, 1967 Fowlie, Wallace, Baudilaire and Eliot: Interpreters of Their Age, T.S. Eliot, and Windus London, 1967

S. S Sharma Conrad Aiken iii S.S Sharma

ii