Romanticism versus Classicism: A Reading of Two Conflicting Ideologies in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Gerontion

T. E. Hulme in his essay Romanticism and Classicismstates “…after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival” (Hulme 1913: 93).Here Hulme boldly claims the shift into classicism as fact, and leaves romanticism behind.The revival that he predicts is confined to poetryasit is not about order and results. The focus of poetry is to make concrete images using language.It is fundamentally visual and is meant to arrest or fascinate the reader. The focal point of interest of Hulme’s arguments is his idea of romanticism and classicism; and fancy as an important tool for new classical verse which can be appropriately applied to T. S. Eliot’s poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Gerontion.

Thomas Stearns Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions. As a poet, he transmuted his resemblance for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century most notably John Donne; and the 19th century French symbolist poets including Baudelaire and Laforgue into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste[1].

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as "Prufrock", is a poem by T. S. Eliot. He began writing the poem in February 1910 and it was first published in June 1915 issue of Poetry: a Magazine of Verse at the instigation of Ezra Pound. It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. In his early drafts, Eliot gave the poem the subtitle Prufrock among the Women. This subtitle was apparently discarded before publication. Eliot called the poem a "love song" in reference to Rudyard Kipling's poem The Love Song of HarDyal which was first published in Kipling's collection Plain Tales from the Hills. However, the origin of the name Prufrock is not certain, and Eliot never remarked on its origin other than to claim he was unsure of how he came upon the name. While many scholars and indeed Eliot himself have pointed towards the autobiographical elements in the character of Prufrock, Eliot at the time of writing the poem was in the habit of rendering his name as "T. Stearns Eliot," very similar in form to that of J. Alfred Prufrock. It is suggested that the name "Prufrock" came from Eliot's youth in St. Louis, Missouri where the Prufrock-Litton Company, a large furniture store, occupied one city block. At the time of its publication, Prufrock was considered shocking and offensive, but is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from the late 19th century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism[2].

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has been called by some critics, the first modern poem. It certainly introduced a style, an idiom, an atmosphere which was all astonishingly new and arresting. This poem reflected the later disillusioned mood of the First World War, and its note of weary pessimism and mockery met with an eager response from the younger generation of readers disillusioned with the war and with their elders. (Williams 1965: 4) Eliot narrates the experience of the character Prufrock, using stream of consciousness technique, a form developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and incapability for decisive action that is said to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual and represent dissatisfied desires and modern disillusionment.Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual lethargy, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With primitive feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality,The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrockhas become one of the most recognized voices in modern literature.

Gerontion,another poem by T. S. Eliot, was first published in 1920. The poem arrived at the point in life where no time remains except that for reviewing the past and gathering the courage to face death.Eliot was working on Gerontionwhen his personal failure in marriage and career coincided with the graphic horrors of World War I. During that period, Europe was undergoing major transformation as old systems of government and international relations were being replaced with new laws and traditions. These incidents left him in an acute period of darkness.The poem relates the opinions and impressions of a ‘gerontic’ or elderly man, through a dramatic monologue which describes Europe after World War I through the eyes of a man who has lived the majority of his life in the 19th Century. Eliot considered using this already published poem as a preface to The Waste Land, but decided to keep it as an independent poem. Along with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, and other works published by Eliot in the early part of his career, Gerontion discusses themes of religion, sexuality, and other general topics of Modernist poetry.

Eliot’s classicism is evident in his insistence on the importance of form as contrasted with content. This makes him an earnest experimenter in poetic forms and poetic measures. For example, he uses dramatic monologue in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Gerontion, the form which was discarded by almost all the modernist writers; allusion in The Wasteland etc. This constitutes various endeavours to find the right form to express feelings at different times in the development of his poetic career (George 1962: 123).The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Gerontion are very important for Eliot’s poetic career as “Prufrock” stands at the beginning of the 1917 volume of Poems; and 1920 volume begins with Gerontion. “Prufrock” contains the definite anti-romantic statement of Eliot. Gerontion contains the definite anti-humanistic statement.

It is important to note that Eliot's kind of Modernist poetry sought to revive the literary past, as he argued for in Tradition and the Individual Talent. His poems, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Gerontion, are peppered with allusions to the Greeks, Shakespeare, the Metaphysical, and more. However, Eliot does not neglect the modern.It is often front and centre, usually with unfavourable comparisons to the past.Most critics read their own sense of disillusion into the poems of Eliot. They read the poems as though they contained Eliot’s attack on modern times, life and manners, as contrasted with a glorious past, and as though they portrayed the loss of meaning, purpose, direction and conviction in modern civilization. This viewpoint occurs in almost every discussion of his poetry. Edmund Wilson says for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Eliot like Flaubert feels at every turn that human life is now ignoble, sordid or tame, and he is haunted or tormented by intimations that it has once been otherwise.(Wilson 1959: 100)
Concerning Gerontion Wolf Mankowitz remarks,
And it is the whole nature of contemporary barrenness which is examined in the course of an old man’s reverie.(Mankowitz 1947: 129)
In general, the critics consider Eliot’s poems as mere criticisms on latter day civilization. Eliot was very provoked by this misinterpretation and he rejected these notions emphatically. He said:
I dislike the word ‘generation’, which has been a talisman for the last ten years; when I wrote a poem called The WasteLand some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation’, which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intension.(Eliot 1950: 368)
This is true for Eliot’s Gerontion and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock as well. Though he shows disillusionment of city life, loneliness, guilt, and rapid changes in daily life which forms the modern world; one can still easily find examples and references of classical writers in these poems. In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent Eliot talks about keeping in mind the contemporary readers or audience while composing a work of art; but at the same time he also puts emphasis on tradition or classical attitude. He was a great believer in the historical value of art. He argues that the poet must develop or obtain the consciousness of the past, especially the literary past. He says:
Tradition involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.[3]
This sense of past considered by Eliot also supports Hulme’s argument of classical revival in poetry. The most remarkable example from Gerontion and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock that sustains Hulme an Eliot’s argumentsof classical revival is that of Eliot’s use of epigraph in the present poems.The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock begins with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno, Canto 27. The translation reads:
If I but thought that my response were made
to one perhaps returning to the world,
this tongue of flame would cease to flicker.
But since, up from these depths, no one has yet
returned alive, if what I hear is true,
I answer without fear of being shamed.[4]
The speaker, Guido da Montefeltro, imprisoned in a flame in Hell, relates his shameful, evil life to Dante only because he thinks Dante will never go back to earth and repeat it. But Dante comes back to the earth and tells the story.This epigraph unifies the text and brings, through its imagery and context, a deeper understanding of Eliot's poem. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock represents both of the characters in this section of the Inferno, corresponding to Dante in the first section and Guido da Montefeltro in the second and third. Dante represents the antithesis of Prufrock as well as the ideal that Prufrock strives for. The flame-bound Guido da Montefeltro represents through his words and condition, the isolated and wasteful state that Prufrock has condemned himself to inhabit. In this manner, the epigraph brings the poem to full circle, allowing the reader to grasp firmly the extent of Prufrock's internal collapse. Even Gerontion begins with an epigraph from Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure. It reads:
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.(Eliot 1940: 18)
This is a reference to an elderly character that critics believe to be an older version of J. Alfred Prufrock.The use of pronouns such as "us" and "I" regarding the speaker and a member of the opposite sex as well as the general discourse in lines 53-58 presents the same sexual themes that face Prufrock, only this time they meet with the body of an older man. The poem describes the relationship between the narrator and the world around him.

Eliot was basically a humanist. He believed that theories of social and religious reconstruction must be based on theories concerning human nature. The conflict of ideologies originates in opposing theories about the nature of man, and the genesis of modern crisis lies in a serious misunderstanding about man. In medieval times, the supremacy of the Catholic Church in Europe had gained supreme position in society, and progress was possible on account of this social stability. Such stability was destroyed by the “chaotic” Renaissance and nothing of universal authority comparable to that of the mediaeval church has come into being so far. Eliot was against this instability in the society. Eliot’s orthodoxy must be judged against the background of this dire need for social stability and also in relation to the modern critical condition of humanity which lives in a world dangerously poised on the brink of total ruin. This is the reason why Eliot shows the cynicism of Prufrock who is an old man living in a fast changing modern world. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrocktransmits the thoughts of a sexually frustrated middle-aged man who wants to say something but is afraid to do so, and ultimately does not. The first line of the poem after epilogue reads: “Let us go then, you and I,” (Eliot 1940: 9) However, the dispute lies in to whom Prufrock is speaking.The intended audience is not evident. Some believe that Prufrock is talking to another person or directly to the reader, while others believe Prufrock's monologue is internal. Some critics believe that “you” and “I” are divided parts of Prufrock’s own nature while other believes it to be the relationship between the dilemmas of the character and the author. Similarly, critics dispute whether Prufrock is going somewhere during the course of the poem or he is not physically going anywhere, but rather, is playing through it in his mind. Even, Prufrockis trying totell a woman of his romantic interest in her,pointing to the various images of women's arms and clothing. But he cannot express his feelings as he is afraid of rejection by her. His anxiety is rooted in the social world. He afraid to confront the women who are talking of the most famous sculpture by Michelangelo- David, an epitome of masculine beauty,which stands against a lifeless Prufrock. He also seems frightened by the social pretentiousness he must engage in. This shows Prufrock’s endeavours to express some deeper philosophical insight or disappointment with society, but he fears rejection. He says: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” (Eliot 1940: 13). It shows his cynicism with modern world. And the final few lines in which Prufrock laments that even the mermaids will not sing to him. He says:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think they will sing to me.(Eliot 1940: 14)
Such example shows baffled situation or displacement of an aging character in the modern day world. According to many critics, the poem is a satire on Edwardian society in which the British class system was very rigid; and Prufrock's dilemma represents the inability to live a meaningful existence in the modern world.For many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment.

Even Gerontion as the title suggests, shows an old man who criticizes aging, aridity, and spiritual decay and despairs of civilization. The poem contains six stanzas of free verse describing the relationship between the narrator and the world around him. In method too, the poem represents a development. Gerontion is a part of The Waste Land, and that is why the last lines of the poem “Tenants of the house, Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season” (Eliot 1940: 21) suggests that these "tenants" are the voices of The Waste Land and that Eliot is describing the method of the poem's narrative by saying that the speaker uses several different voices to express the impressions of Gerontion. There is no logical continuity or narrative present in the poem. The only place, in which the characters mentioned in the poem come together, is in the mind of the old protagonist. The Jew who “squats on the window sill” (Eliot 1940: 18) cannot hear the old man even if he spoke his thoughts aloud, and the field overhead in which the goat coughs has no geographical relation to the house. All the persons, incidents and images are there to evoke the immediate consciousness of the old man as he broods over a life lived through and asks aboutplausible the outcome. The poem opens with the recurrent theme of Eliot, the mixing of ‘memory and desire’ in present barrenness. The old man in his ‘dry month’ is waiting for the life-giving ‘rain’ that he knows will never come. He is moved to envy, then to emotional recollection. It is the tale of hot-blooded vitality which contrasts with the unpleasantness of his actual surroundings. Youthful desire mingles in memory with lofty emotions, those associated with the mysteries of religion. The poem attempts to present the theme of Christianity from the viewpoint of the Modernist individual with various references to the Incarnation and salvation. Some criticsbelieve that the poem moves from Christmas Day to the Crucifixion:
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger.

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering
judas, (Eliot 1940: 18, 19)
Here in the last two phrases, Eliot has presented transitions form theme to theme. Moreover, different emotions and feelings are contrasted and fused. Eliot coins the word “juvescence” from the word “juvenescence,” meaning youth. The youth of the year is usually interpreted as the springtime i.e. Easter, although it could arguably be Christmas too, if we see the end of one year as the start of another. Probably it can also be Easter since this is also the start of the Church’s year. Judas is basically a beautiful tree. Here it is also a reference toJudas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ. Tiger is the evidence of God’s darker, deadlier side, which emphasizes judgment rather than compassion. Gerontion is a Judas-figure through much of this poem who is characterised by his sinful nature and inability to find meaning in life. It is said that the original Judas eventually committed suicide.[5]It is a kind of effect that Shakespeare gets in his Sonnet 94 as ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’, where the associations that cluster round ‘lilies’ that are fragrant flowers and emblems of purity contrasted and fused with those attaching to ‘fester’, which apply to rotting flesh (Southam 1978: 125).Gerontion contemplates the paradoxical recovery of freedom through slavery and grace through sin.Gerontion views his life as the product of sin. He feels that Christ appears to him as a curse because he understands that he must reject the “dead world” in order to obtain the salvation offered by Christianity. However, the poem is a description of life devoid of faith.

To a large extent, T. S. Eliot is responsible for the modern “cult of the Middle Ages.” This “cult of the Middle Ages” which Eliot is said to advocate, does not consist in a nostalgic longing for the bygone days of glory but it implies the rediscovery of certain significant aspects of life and thought which have been ignored since the Renaissance. Eliot’s both the poems point out the existential and religious characters. By the word “religion” Eliot always implies Christianity (George 1962: 72). His championship of the Christian world view is well known. In his Selected Essays, Eliot writes:
In the light of those absolute values, man himself is judged to be essentially limited and imperfect. He is endowed with Original sin… A man is essentially bad. He can only accomplish anything of value by discipline- ethical and political. Order is thus not merely negative but creative and liberating. Institutions are necessary. 9Eliot 1950: 430)
In the quote above one can easily trace Eliot’s fondness for classical revival. When he talks about the importance of institutions one can easily relate this to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. When Prufrock sees
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.(Eliot 1940: 10)
It shows the present civilization in the image of “globe-trotting Madam”, a cosmopolitan tourist visiting the great work of Michelangelo(Singh 1990: 144).This image also shows the purposelessness and superficial refinement of such women which is hollow in relation to the vitality, solidity and creativity of Michelangelo which can hardly be experienced in terms of such casual gossip. The extremity of civilization, the elaborate conventions of sophisticated social life tend to distract from the main business of living and in a rare flash of self awareness which is the same as the awareness of the days and ways of his world, Prufrock says:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (Eliot 1940: 12)
The extreme sophistication of his life inhibits him in his dealing with women while at the same time it makes him aware of them just sensually. Prufrock’s desire to revert to the first emergence of biological life is a typically compensating instinct with the implication that present times are no better than such animal-life and perhaps worse in relation to its vitality. He might as well be one of the isolated minority which fails to respond creatively to the crisis of his time:
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?(Eliot 1940: 12)
These are the features of the decay of civilization and dire need of discipline and order into the superficial modern world.

Gerontion also tries to explore the real reasons of negating belief in contemporary life and to be more precise of Christian belief. Although, there may be a mechanical participation in the rites of Christianity or passive acceptance of its dogmas, there is no passionate participation. Superstitious fear has supplanted innocent belief. Gerontion is cut off from the organic world; he is also cut off from the living truth, sustaining sense of relatedness. He knows that Christ the tiger is also the helpless child of Lancelot Andrews’s sermon; but his mind cannot keep the paradox in balance, and as guilt drives him mercilessly against the wall it is the tiger that trails through his unnatural year. The confrontation of reality cannot be endured. Gerontion declares:
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly…(Eliot 1940: 20)
With the repeated ‘Think now’ and ‘Think at last’ forcing the moment of its intellectual crisis, seem to result in a last minute facing of reality:Gerontion’s response is that of fear, not courage, in the metaphysical sense, and both its content and emptiness are pitilessly exposed in what is perhaps the most moving passage of the poem, as the imagery of the old age blends into the sense of withering away from God:
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?(Eliot 1940: 20)
In a way Gerontion’s predicament is that of Prufrock. He has moved forward in the act of definition, but he cannot cross the threshold, cannot make that surrender to reality which involves death of the illusion which is his life. Gerontion’s identity is disintegrated and even crushed and to restore this identity he needs to go back to his old beliefs and customs. In a way he needs to go back to his classic roots.

In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the protagonist is like Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He is clearly a thinker, not a feeler, and his indecisive thoughts contribute directly to his paralysis, perhaps the most important theme in the poem. Bergson was a great influence on Eliot. Bergson theory propounds that man’s primary need is not knowledge alone but action too. Prufrock’s indecisiveness cycles around even the smallest of concerns:
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.(Eliot 1940: 10)
He seems rooted in the present and this, according to Eliot and most Modernists, is an unhealthy approach to time. The only way to achieve this mental sense of duration, Bergson maintains, is through direct intuition rather than indirect analysis. While much New Age philosophy and theory has captured this idea - that one should feel rather than think is an appealing concept - the damaging effects to Prufrock are evident.

Thus, Eliot’s view of art is unromantic. He does not see the poet as communicating feelings or ideas so much as using his feelings or ideas in order to create a new artistic order. His ideas are basically those of the “Imagists” like Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Hilda Doolittle, etc. although Eliot was never a member of their group (Williams 1965: 19). He believed that in the modern situation, faith, discipline and re-thinking were badly needed. So his poetry presents departure, change, conversion and desolation. This is true for both of the present poems of Eliot. His literary canons are that of Dryden, Pope and Dr. Johnson rather than those of Wordsworth and Shelly, which in other words emphasis on reason, the universal and the impersonal. One can conclude that if the ambience of The Love Song of J. AlfredPrufrock is comic, the Jacobean corridors of Gerontion are slippery with images of illusion and betrayal in modern life.

Notes:
  1. 1. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/18#sthash.fV4OMeRk.dpuf 07/08/2013
  2. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock 09/08/2013
  3. 3. http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html 09/08/2013
  4. 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock 09/08/2013
  5. 5. http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Ts-eliot-gerontion-lyrics#note-1600966 09/08/2013
Works Cited.
  1. 1. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays 1917-1932. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1950.
  2. 2. ________ T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land and other Poems. London/ Boston: Faber & Faber, 1940.
  3. 3. George, A. E. T. S. Eliot His Mind and Art. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962.
  4. 4. Hulme, T. E. Romanticism and Classicism. 1913.
  5. 5. Mankowitz, Wolf. T. S. Eliot: Study of His Writings by Several Hands. London: Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1947
  6. 6. Rajan, B. T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings by Several Hands. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966
  7. 7. Singh, S. B. Hardy, Yeats & Eliot: Towards a Meaning of History. New Delhi: Bahri Publications, 1990.
  8. 8. Southam, B. C. T.S. Eliot: Prufrock, Gerontion, Ash Wednesday and other shorter poems. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1978.
  9. 9. Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study of Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959.
  10. 10. Williams, Moore Haydn.T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1965.

Dhara Desai
Adhoc/Guest Faculty,
Department of English,
Veer Narmad South Gujarat University