I: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1910-11)
Before you begin reading this poem, jot
down notes on the following
questions:
--Ask yourself what you usually expect when you read a love poem?
Consider
the conventions that surround declarations of love in literature.
[Think
back, for instance, of Darcy and Lizzie Bennet; Eleanor Bold and Mr.
Arabin;
Porphyro and Madeline; Yeats expressing his feelings about Maud Gonne].
--If you are told that a poem or novel involves a love story, why might
that encourage you to read it, or on the contrary, avoid it?
1. Using the notes you have made in response to the prompting above, explain the ways Prufrock is or is not, in your view, a satisfying singer of his love. If we compare him to the male lovers above, how is he different in his declarations of love? Does he love, and if so, whom?
2. Consider these images carefully:
--the evening compared to a patient (lines 2-3)
--the yellow fog compared to ....? (lines 15-22)
--the yellow smoke ... (lines 23-25)
--the mermaids ... (lines 124-131)
Do you find them memorable, and if so, what particular feeling or
emotion
do they articulate that might have been difficult to put into more
conventional
language?
3. Make a list of the literary texts that Eliot alludes to or cites in this poem and then, move on to his poetic theory in "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
II: "Tradition and the Individual
Talent"
You could read this essay as a landmark statement that distinguishes
Modernist views of the poet (and his relation to the poets who have
gone
before him) from the views of a Romanticist like Wordsworth. In fact,
what
Eliot has to say here is not as radical and new as many Modernist
critics
like to claim. The Victorian scholars and critics he has learned from
are
Matthew Arnold ("The Function of Criticism at the Present Time") and
Walter
Pater (the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance, "Prosper
Mérimée"
and other essays).
1. Think about the chemistry image on page
2398. If the "finely filiated
platinum" represents the poet, and the elements (oxygen and sulphur
dioxide)
are the emotions and feelings produced by the literature he reads, then
what does the "sulphurous acid" represent?
2. Given this chemistry image, can you figure out how Eliot's view
of the poet and the emotions he expresses is different from
Wordsworth's?
Look especially at page 2400 where he cites Wordsworth.
3. Think back of the question that dogged Victorian poets like
Tennyson,
Browning, Hopkins et al: the question of whether a poet should engage
with
the social problems of his day (the Woman Question, the existence of
God,
the injustices of war etc.), or whether he should remain detached from
them. Does Eliot's view imply that the poet should be a participant in
contemporary history or removed from it?
III: "The Hollow Men" (1925)
1. In a footnote on page 2383, the Norton editors direct you to page
2010 for the source of Eliot's first epigraph, "Mistah Kurtz--he dead"
which comes from Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness. On
page
2001, there should be another allusion to the hollowness of Kurtz. Find
this citation and comment on its suggestiveness for Eliot's verse.
2. What, according to this poem, seems to
have happened to our old ideal
of Victorian manliness, exemplified in Tennyson's "Ulysses" or
Trollope's
character, old Mr. Harding, in the wake of World War I?
Revisiting and Revising "The Woman
Question"
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)
1. In "Prufrock," the insertion of "then" in the first line of the poem has the interesting effect of suggesting that the monologue directed from "I" to "you" has been quietly trickling on for some time. What is the effect of Woolf's beginning not only a sentence, but an entire essay, with the conjunction "But"?
2. Woolf uses two anecdotes about a visit to Cambridge to describe the status of women in the Modernist period. How are the problems she faces different from those faced by Victorian female figures such as Aurora Leigh or Hardy's "ruined maid"?
3. What do you think of Woolf's assertion (page 2172) that an inheritance of £500 a year in 1928 is more valuable to a woman than gaining the vote? Give reasons.