Tradition in Modernist Poetry: The Historical Sense and Impersonality in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

In the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot develops a particular stance of aesthetic criticism by arguing that poetic novelty can only be achieved in relation to a wider literary tradition. The essay coins the term ‘historical sense’ to describe a poet’s skill in constructing a dramatic framework through inter-textual allusion. This thesis identifies allusion as a key device Eliot used to position his modernist poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” within a wider literary tradition. Although his critical essay is not a systematic guideline to poetic analysis, my thesis sets out to appropriate key principles from the ‘historical sense’ into an interpretive framework to close read his poem. In doing so, this thesis explains why the modernist poem alludes to medieval, classical, and biblical texts; with particular emphasis on why the epigraph refers to Dante’s Inferno. This thesis suggests that “Tradition and the Individual Talent” can serve as a useful...Show moreIn the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot develops a particular stance of aesthetic criticism by arguing that poetic novelty can only be achieved in relation to a wider literary tradition. The essay coins the term ‘historical sense’ to describe a poet’s skill in constructing a dramatic framework through inter-textual allusion. This thesis identifies allusion as a key device Eliot used to position his modernist poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” within a wider literary tradition. Although his critical essay is not a systematic guideline to poetic analysis, my thesis sets out to appropriate key principles from the ‘historical sense’ into an interpretive framework to close read his poem. In doing so, this thesis explains why the modernist poem alludes to medieval, classical, and biblical texts; with particular emphasis on why the epigraph refers to Dante’s Inferno. This thesis suggests that “Tradition and the Individual Talent” can serve as a useful guideline to analyse how, and why the poem combines innovative and traditional elements. Although the essay was published five years after the poem, this thesis argues that the poem already contains nascent clues to the idea of combining past and present elements. Furthermore, Eliot’s essay presents a theory of ‘Impersonality’, which serves as a second interpretive framework to further close read into ambiguous passages. Overall, my comparative reading of these two primary texts will reveal some limitations and strengths to Eliot’s aesthetic philosophy; and furthermore, demonstrate that this complex relation between tradition and innovation is Eliot’s most significant contribution to high modernism.Show less

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Tradition in Modernist Poetry: The Historical Sense and Impersonality in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”