Surrealism in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock :: Love Song J. Alfred Prufrock

Surrealism in The Love pains of J. Alfred Prufrock           Surrealism is a breakneck word to use about the poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot, and certainly with his frontmost major work,  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock . Eliot wrote the poem, subsequently all, years before Andre Breton and his compatriots began defining and practicing surrealism proper. Andre Breton published his first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, seven years after Eliots publication of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  It was this manifesto which delineate the movement in philosophical and psychological terms. Moreover, Eliot would later show indifference, incomprehension and at times ill will toward surrealism and its precursor Dada.         Eliots favourites among his French contemporaries werent surrealists, but were rather the figures of  St. John Perse and capital of Minnesota Verlaine, among others.  Thi s does not mean Eliot had nothing in common with surrealist poetry, but the facts that two Eliot and the Surrealists owed much to Charles Baudelaires can perhaps best explain any likeness strangely evocative explorations of the symbolic suggestions of objects and images.  Its unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions often characterise surrealism, by which it tries to transcend logic and habitual thinking, to reveal deeper levels of importee and of unconscious associations. Although scholars might not classify Eliot as a Surrealist, the surreal landscape, defined as an attempt to express the workings of the subconscious see by images without order, as in a dream   is exemplified in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.         Prufrock presents a symbolic landscape where the meaning emerges from the mutual interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged by echoes, often heroic, of other writers.         &nb sp The juxtapositions mentioned earlier  are unmistakable even at the poems opening, which begins on a rather sombre note, with a nightmarish passage from Dantes Inferno.  The main character, Guido de Montefeltro, confesses his sins to Dante, assuming that none has ever returned springy from this depth this depth being Hell.  As the reader has never see death and the passage through the Underworld, he must rely on his own imagination (and/or subconscious)  to place a proper deferred payment onto this cryptic opening.  Images of a landscape of fire and brimstone come to mind as do images of the two characters sharing a surprisingly insouciant