Style & Form

"Prufrock" displays the two most important characteristics of Eliot’s early poetry. First, it is strongly influenced by the French Symbolists, like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, whom Eliot had been reading almost constantly while writing the poem. From the Symbolists, Eliot takes his sensuous language and eye for anti-aesthetic detail that contributes to the total beauty of the poem (the yellow smoke and the hair-covered arms of the women are two good examples of this). The Symbolists, too, privileged the same kind of individual Eliot creates with Prufrock: the moody, urban, isolated-yet-sensitive thinker. However, whereas the Symbolists would have been more likely to make their speaker himself a poet or artist, Eliot chooses to make Prufrock an unacknowledged poet, a sort of artist for the common man.

"Prufrock" is a variation on the dramatic monologue, a type of poem popular with Eliot’s predecessors. Dramatic monologues are similar to soliloquies in plays. Three things characterize the dramatic monologue. First, they’re the words of a specific individual (not the poet) at a specific moment in time; then the monologue is specifically directed at listeners whose presence is not referenced but is just suggested in the speaker’s words, and the primary focus is the development and revelation of the speaker’s character. Eliot modernizes the form by removing the implied listeners and focusing on Prufrock’s interiority and isolation.

The rhyme scheme of this poem is irregular but not random. While sections of the poem may resemble free verse, in reality, “Prufrock” is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic forms. One of the most prominent formal characteristics of this work is the use of refrains. Prufrock’s continual return to the “women (who) come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” and his recurrent questionings (“how should I presume?”) and pessimistic ideas (“That is not it, at all.”) help Eliot describe the consciousness of a modern, neurotic individual. Another important formal feature is the use of fragments of sonnet form, particularly at the poem’s conclusion, in fact the three three-line stanzas are rhymed as the conclusion of a Petrarchan sonnet would be.