excerpt from commentary on "Prufrock"

 This is an excerpt from Eric McMillan's commentary.

What makes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" a great poem though, in my opinion, is not the commentary on woeful humanity but the style and technique. It's one lively poem. Nothing in it is like anything in any poetry before. This may not be so apparent today because much poetry since then has been in imitation of this. You have to read earlier poetry to understand what an exciting, novel vision of poetry was being introduced by Eliot and the other imagists of this time.

"Prufrock" dispenses with sentimentality and romanticism, which had previously governed poetry. No grand, rolling phrases here except for satirical effect. No fine sentiments about finding all Truth in a single flower petal. No set verse form into which all vocabulary and grammar are contorted to fit. Line lengths and metres vary according to the rhythms of natural speech. Rhyme is thrown in sporadically for almost humourous effect. Poetic and colloquial language are mixed. High and low culture swirl together in a collage—references to Hamlet and Michelangelo alongside discussion of how one parts one's hair. Questions of mortality next to consideration of whether to eat a peach. Irony takes over as the aesthetic of the twentieth century.