The present inquiry examines T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in light of the various literary influences the poem betrays and symptomatically represses at the same time. Although few could have doubted the painful labors underwriting the creation of this early poetic work, it is mainly thanks to the 1996 publication of Christopher Ricks’ Inventions of the March Hare, which for the first time presented Eliot‘s own compositional notes, that we have come to realize the extent to which the young poet scrupulously chiseled out excess elements from his poem. By drawing references to this background material as well as some of the more apparent literary allusions crisscrossing the poem, my paper argues that in “Prufrock” Eliot attempted to exorcise the ghostly influence of such powerful literary figures as Walter Pater and Walt Whitman, whose romantic vision Eliot knew he had to outrun in order to succeed as a modernist poet. Where the poet ends up, however, following his struggle with the overriding anxiety of influence, is a dead-end street cornered by that other gigantic ghost known as Shakespeare, the man whose works Eliot learned to detest from early on. The outcome of that confrontation is for the readers to judge. Yet, when we compare, and contrast, it to a similar Shakespearean engagement made by James Joyce in his short story “The Dead,” Eliot’s creative battle with the foremost representative of the Western secular literature offers much-needed food for thought in our era of dangerous desecularization.
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