Prufrock and Other Observations

“Prufrock” passes the subtractive test as few poems of its length do. Each verse paragraph is a stage in one evasion: the invitation that never names its question, the fog that “rubs its back upon the window-panes”, the rehearsal of the visit, the chain of things that would or would not have been worth while, the collapse into “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be”, and the drowning. Even the refrain of the women who “come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” is the room’s indifference returning on him. What holds the axis is the volume. “Aunt Helen”, “Cousin Nancy”, “The Boston Evening Transcript” and “Conversation Galante” are well turned, but the book could lose any one of them and know nothing less; “Hysteria” is the slightest of all, and “Portrait of a Lady” has a loose middle. A single poem would stand higher; the book, with perhaps a quarter of its pages removable, stands here.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a consciousness so watchful of itself that it cannot act, and a society whose rituals of tea, visits and talk are the medium of that paralysis rather than its cause. “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” names the condition, and “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” gives it a unit. “Portrait of a Lady” turns the same knowledge on the young man’s cruelty and guilt, and ends unsure who has been exposed. “Preludes” carries it from the drawing room to the street, the city as the soul’s furniture, and admits one pity, for “some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing”, which it at once mocks. This is meaning, not mood. Held below the top because the satires disclose little beyond a manner, and because in every poem it is one disclosure seen from several doors.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height in “Prufrock” is real and comes late: the mermaids “singing, each to each” and the last lines, ending “Till human voices wake us, and we drown”, are among the most lifted endings in modern English verse, and they are lifted by the very voice that has spent the poem disqualifying itself. Dread rises in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, where “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium”, and the poem closes on “The last twist of the knife”. “La Figlia Che Piange” reaches a cold, posed beauty: “Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair”. “Preludes” rises once, in the gentle and suffering thing, before the worlds revolve like women “Gathering fuel in vacant lots”. Frequency is what holds the axis: the elevation lives in four or five places, and the satires, by design, never leave the level ground.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Prufrock is the book’s clearest case of a particular becoming archetypal while staying particular: a man with a bald spot and a morning coat, who will wear the bottoms of his trousers “rolled”, has become the type of the modern timid self, and his name is used of people who have not read the poem. That is built, not evoked. The machinery around him is mostly evoked: Lazarus, the Baptist’s head “brought in upon a platter”, Hamlet and Polonius, Michelangelo, the mermaids. The epigraph does more. It makes the monologue a speech from the eighth circle, given only because the hearer is thought never to return, and the “you and I” two damned souls. Beyond “Prufrock” the myth thins: “La Figlia” stages Aeneas and Dido as a tableau, and “Mr. Apollinax” sets centaurs and Priapus at a Boston tea for comedy. It stops a step short of the gate.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance in English in 1910 was the Georgian lyric and the late-Victorian dramatic monologue, and the departure, in English, is total. Browning’s monologue is turned inward until there is no listener and no event; the city, “a patient etherised upon a table”, is set where the romantic sky was expected; rhyme is kept and made ironic, landing on bathos; the line lengthens and shortens with the mind; allusion becomes a structural device rather than an ornament. The stake was real: the poem was the work of an unknown, and Harriet Monroe held it back at Poetry until Ezra Pound pressed it into print. Held below the top because the turn was learned. Laforgue, read through Arthur Symons, had made the ironic urban monologue in French a generation earlier, and the satires and “Conversation Galante” come close to pastiche of him.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. A Prufrock told in prose, or in regular stanzas, would be a portrait of a timid man; told in this verse he is the hesitation itself. The broken verse paragraphs, the questions that loop back (“And how should I presume?”), the rhymes that click shut on trivia, the line that suddenly shortens (“And in short, I was afraid.”), the refrains that return like the room’s chatter: these are how the poem knows that thought has replaced action. The couplet “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” stands alone as a stanza, the one moment the self wishes away its own consciousness, and its isolation on the page is its meaning. “Preludes” makes its four parts four hours and four sensibilities. Held off the top by the satires, whose form is a container for a joke.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over a century. Reading has not settled “Prufrock”. Who is “you”: the reader, the beloved, a second self, the damned listener of the epigraph? What is the question he will not ask? Does the close drown him into the human or out of it? How much of Prufrock is the young Eliot, and how much of the irony is protective? Each generation of criticism has found more: the New Critics, the biographical readings that followed the publication of the letters, the readings of the poem as a document of modern masculinity and of sexual dread. It remains among the poems most taught and most written on in the language, and “Portrait of a Lady” and “Preludes” sustain return. What holds the axis is the satires: they yield once, as satires do, and the book’s depth sits in a third of its pages.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is poetry in English in the 1910s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: “Prufrock” showed that English verse could hold the city, the nerves and the self-consciousness of a modern mind in a voice at once lyrical and ironic, and it set allusion, juxtaposition and the unresolved persona as methods. Held below the top on two counts: the larger reorganisation, the one most poets answered, was The Waste Land (9.1 on this desk), and the method was French before it was English. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a threshold text of English modernism, printed in 1915 and gathered here in 1917, from which Pound’s advocacy and the Egoist’s circle took Eliot’s manner, before The Waste Land; with Pound it ended the Georgian mode’s authority; the generation of Auden and the American poets of the mid-century learned the ironic, self-observing voice from it; and its phrases entered the common language.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and nine years. Form: the text survives whole and without dispute, as Eliot printed it and as he kept it in every collected edition. Presence is continuous and wide: “Prufrock” is among the most anthologised and most taught poems in English, read in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, translated widely, and its lines are proverbial. The fabric is charged in part: the Boston tea tables and the satires of “Cousin Nancy” and “Aunt Helen” are period pieces, and the volume as a volume is read mainly through the collected poems. On “Prufrock” alone the presence would be the widest its span can show; the book, whose lesser pages are kept alive by the great one, stands a step below that.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Eliot’s English, with no translation between. The command is of cadence and rhyme. “Prufrock” moves between a long, almost prose line and a clipped one with full control; its rhymes are placed so that the comic and the desolate share a sound (“I grow old ... I grow old ... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”); its sound is exact, from the sibilance of “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” to the long vowels of the last stanza. “Preludes” opens on a dying fall: “The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passageways. / Six o’clock.” “Rhapsody” sustains a free line against the clock. At the top the making is load-bearing. Charged: the juvenile Laforguian manner of “Conversation Galante” and “Hysteria”, which are clever exercises, and some slackness in the middle of “Portrait of a Lady”.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One law governs: the observer who watches and cannot join, the genteel world and the street at evening, desire meeting a social surface and failing. Take the two most distant elements, the cold sublime of “La Figlia” and the laugh of Mr. Apollinax, like an “irresponsible foetus”: they obey it. The title’s “Observations” names the law, and the book keeps it from the first poem to the last. No poem contradicts another; the satires sit at a lower pressure than the lyrics, which is a difference of intensity, not of law. The charge is width. The range runs from lyric to squib but stays inside one sensibility, one class and the two halves of one world, Boston’s drawing rooms and the streets of the “Preludes”; narrowness is not coherence, and the coherence here is partly that of a narrow world.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what a short volume of lyrics holds, and not marked down for being short beyond what it holds. Consciousness, fully and at depth. Desire and sexual fear, in “Prufrock”, “Portrait of a Lady” and “Hysteria”. The city, its streets, rooms, smells and poor, in “Preludes” and “Rhapsody”. Class and its manners, in Boston and the drawing room. Age and death, in Prufrock’s balding and the young man’s “what if she should die some afternoon”. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent or only touched: the sacred appears as allusion, Lazarus and the Baptist, and is not held; labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent but for the women gathering fuel in the “Preludes”; and one consciousness, or one kind, holds what there is.

Score: 7.2 / 10