The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: The Dramatic Monologue Re-Imagined

The Poetry of T. S. Eliot

In this course, Professor Seamus Perry (University of Oxford) explores the poetry of T. S. Eliot through five key poems. In the first three modules, we explore 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', thinking in particular about its status as a dramatic monologue, its 'difficulty' (and the 'difficulty' of Eliot's poetry more generally), and the presentation of the narrator's social anxieties. After that, we turn to 'Portrait of a Lady', where we think about the tension between civilization and savagery, before turning in the next six modules to Eliot's modernist masterpiece, 'The Waste Land', providing an introduction to the poem as a whole before going through each of the five parts of the poem in turn. After that, in the eleventh module, we turn to 'The Hollow Men', before ending by thinking about Eliot's conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, and his application of the modernist technique to the Christian story of the nativity in 'The Journey of the Magi'.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: The Dramatic Monologue Re-Imagined

In this module, we think about 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' as a dramatic monologue, focusing on the literary antecedents of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, as well the philosophy of F. H. Bradley.