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

Surrealism in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock           Surrealism is a dangerous word to use about the poet, playwright and dilettante T.S. Eliot, and certainly with his first major work,  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock . Eliot wrote the poem, after all, long time 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 defined the movement in philosophical and psychological terms. Moreover, Eliot would later show indifference, incomprehension and at times opposition toward surrealism and its precursor Dada.         Eliots favourites among his French contemporaries werent surrealists, but were quite the figures of  St. John Perse and Paul Verlaine, among others.  This does not mean Eliot had nothing in common with surrealist poetry, but the facts that both Eliot and the Surrealists owed untold to Charles Baudelaires can perhaps best explain any similarity strangely evocative explorations of the symbolic suggestions of objects and images.  Its unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions often characterize surrealism, by which it tries to give-up the ghost logic and habitual thinking, to reveal deeper levels of content and of unconscious associations. Although scholars might not classify Eliot as a Surrealist, the surreal landscape, defined as an attempt to bear the workings of the subconscious mind 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.           The juxtapos itions mentioned earlier  are evident 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 alive from this depth this depth being Hell.  As the reader has neer experienced death and the passage through the Underworld, he must rely on his own imagination (and/or subconscious)  to place a proper annexe 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 casual