ts pmo

The observation of the female upper class in the refrain “In the room women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” centres women at the cusp of his internal dilemma as manifestations of shallow life, intensifying Prufrock’s feelings of inadequacy.

The observation

He champions

He champions Michelangelo as a metonym for 19th century decadence, hinting at the augmentation of masculine inferiority, encouraging audiences to question existentialism and whether it “etherises” the modern man or if it is endangered by the expectations of superior social class.

Furthermore, Eliot unveils Prufrock’s desire

Furthermore, Eliot unveils Prufrock’s desire for connection via the repetition of rhetorical questions “Do I dare? Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe?”, highlighting his fear in divulging his egotistical bounds, operating dichotomously on self-posited insecurity and inability to escape a jarring modern society.

By doing this,

By doing this, Eliot holistically captures Prufrock’s dilemma as a “suffrage more in imagination than reality” (Seneca), via the enjambment, disintegrating both the graphical form of the poem and the ontological certitudes of the modern man.

Likewise, Rhapsody propagates

Likewise, Rhapsody propagates this commentary by debasing the conservative Eurocentric attitudes of his context, granting women jurisdiction in the motif of the “feminine moon” when the mind is “held in a lunar synthesis”.

Here, he collapses

Here, he collapses the boundaries of memory as a thinly resisting force to the corrosive influence of the modern city, in its metaphorical ability to “dissolve the floors of memory and all its clear relations”.

This is elucidated when

This is elucidated when the street lamp commands the speaker to “regard [the] woman” negatively because her “eye / Twists like a crooked pin”, where the antiaesthetic imagery manifests modernity’s oppression, embodying a dominance destabilising the speaker’s autonomy to magnify the social paralysis of the modern man.

Thus, Eliot composes a strikingly

Thus, Eliot composes a strikingly complex persona entranced in the dissonances of the search and fear of connection, which I believe illustrates the complexity of ontological resolution prevalently grounded in such urban worlds that ultimately decay. 

The collective anaphoric refrain

The collective anaphoric refrain “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men” juxtaposes ‘hollow’ and ‘stuffed’, rendering the emergence of hedonistic vice as spiritually void, confronting responders with the fragmented consciousness of the modern man, left “imprisoned in [their] own subjective space” (Miller).

Yet, the isolation of the “Hollow Men”

Yet, the isolation of the “Hollow Men” finds disturbing apotheosis in the paratactical fragments of the Lord’s prayer “For Thine is / Life is / For Thine is the” where the enjambment reflects their struggle to obtain religious fulfilment and hence their collective hopelessness, therefore LTQ.

Hence, Eliot charts

Hence, Eliot charts the devolution of the ‘modern man in crisis’ from disillusioned in ‘Rhapsody’ to a nihilistic, spiritual vacuity in ‘Hollow’, that “[depicts] the stagnation and desolation of modern reality . . . destroy[ing] the identity of individuals’”. (Debadrita Chakraborty)

Eliot criticises the rise

Eliot criticises the rise of secularism as a catalyst for moral decline, biblically alluding to John the Baptist’s “head on a platter”, to contrast his martyrdom with Prufrock’s decayed identity as “no prophet… [but] the fool”, confronting contemporary responders with the spiritual blindness of modernity.

Through the Laforguian

Through the Laforguian style of vers libre, Eliot grieves the Hollow Men as beings who have “Shape without form, shade without colour”, experiencing “Paralysed force[s], gesture without motion” through oxymorons, mimetic of the post WW1 zeitgeist of suffering, depicting the final stage of the modern man with apostatic despair.

In doing this,

In doing this, I believe Eliot vastly contrasts the end of the poem through the grim imagery when the “world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper”, bathetically declaring a pathetic state of the world as a didactic culmination of the failed attempts of the modern man to pursue meaning in a world which sought to oppress it.