Is J. Alfred Prufrock insecure?

The ontology is what the poem is about, and thus is obviously what makes it.

Mark Adkins
msadkins04@yahoo.com

Mark Adkins
msadkins04@yahoo.com

That is much more present in the poem than a few tossed off allusions to Dante.

I'm not sure this is so "obvious." Prufrock was written in 1917. According to various articles I'm finding on the net, body hair removal didn't become popular among women until the 1920s. So it's hard to understand why the narrator would be disgusted by a little arm hair (not to mention that it could have a subtle sexual undertone) -- also, the word "downed" sounds pleasant enough to me.

I too always connected the peach with the downy-arms. I have personal associations with the peach thing, too: I have this massive fruit-phobia that really takes shames with peaches. So Archel, I love that you put "risk" on the peach-association list, because that's 90% of what I get out of them -- they're so rarely ideally ripe, and when they're not, they're quite disgusting, and so biting into one is a huge gamble of pleasant possibilities vs. grainy or mushy or god-forbid wormy ... So it's always made sense to me on some intuitive level that it'd be a peach. Peaches are a big leap.

I mean, alternately, it could be an Allman Brothers reference.

Mark Adkins
msadkins04@yahoo.com

In a recent interview, noted contemporary poet David Berman claims that TS Eliot's seminal modernist poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is the "Stairway to Heaven" of twentieth century. In fact, the ontological intention behind the poem could be nothing further from this assessment. While Berman's rockist assertion aligns Prufrock with the more or less progressive rock band Led Zeppelin, Eliot instead meant his poem to stand as orphic warning about the evils of progressive rock. Eliot offers Prufrock as a prophetic allegory of the aging prog rock movement whose increasingly banal self-regard betrays the moral bankruptcy of their chief appeal: arrogant virtuosity. In this article I demostrate that Eliot's elliptical lines forecast the minimalism of punk even as Prufrock himself is autopsized as a somnambulent dinosaur prog rock corpse.

In a recent interview, noted contemporary poet David Berman claims that TS Eliot's seminal modernist poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is the "Stairway to Heaven" of twentieth century American poetry. In fact, the ontological intention behind the poem could be nothing further from this assessment. While Berman's rockist assertion aligns Prufrock with the more or less progressive rock band Led Zeppelin, Eliot instead meant his poem to stand as orphic warning about the evils of progressive rock. Eliot offers Prufrock as a prophetic allegory of the aging prog rock movement whose increasingly banal self-regard betrays the moral bankruptcy of their chief appeal: arrogant virtuosity. In this article I demostrate that Eliot's elliptical lines forecast the minimalism of punk even as Prufrock himself is autopsized as a somnambulent dinosaur prog rock corpse.

I think, like others above, that this is only one (probably 'wrong') interpretation. To me the exclamation mark is revelation, not dismay. And yes, nabisco, I totally associate the peach with the fuzz of arm hair too. It's not so much a defect as something that is always there but not always revealed, it's the exciting and tactile reality/corporality as opposed to the mere surface.

Hurting, do you have your "show LoChris, If it is obvious to me, then it is obvious to everyone that your educational credentials are woefully inadequate for the moderation of this board. I suggest you resign immediately and turn over the keys to one of the recently arrived eggheads.

Hurting, do you have your "show Username" option checked?

Anyway, just joshing, Chris.
Just kidding, Josh.

"The poem seems pretty obsessed with 'mundane existance', and this
seems to be where many of the narrator's anxieties lie: There are ...oyster shells...standing water, soot-filled chimneys, make up, toast and tea, stairs to walk down...coats, neckties, and tie pins..."

What an amusing misrepresentation. It's as if a robot, asked to comment on the meaning of a play, reeled off a list of the props.

Casuistry: "[These things are] much more present in the poem than a few tossed off allusions to Dante."

Those things are the outer trappings, the background, like props in a play. The quote from Dante occupies a prominent place at the start of the poem precisely because it foreshadows the poem's content.

The rest of your comments are equally inane and I shall ignore them.

Hm, I'm beginning to understand why this interpretation appeals to you!

Anyway, mostly I'm pleased that you took the time to elide my quote in a seemingly random but time-consuming fashion.