Deferred Action And Art Of Poetry Creation

T. S. Eliot is one of the most influential English poets and critics in the twentieth century. His doctrines of "impersonality" and "objective correlative" arouse huge impact on western modern poetry creation and poetry criticism. As a representative work of modernism, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) condenses Prufrock’s whole life in this narrative poem; it also portrays his psychic dilemma, delayed actions, contradictory ideas, and his fragmented consciousness by the way of stream of consciousness. This thesis firstly combines Freud’s theory of unconscious and theory of personality to interpret the cause of Prufrock’s delay and his split. Secondly, with the analysis of Eliot’s "objective correlative" theory to explore Eliot’s literary creation and his artistic value. This thesis is mainly concerned two points:firstly, through the investigation of Prufrock’s inner being, it aims to provide readers a deep insight of the exterior world where social civilization and the meaning of life starts to degrade and dissipate at the beginning of the20th century; secondly, it commits to make readers have a comprehensive understanding of T. S. Eliot’s significant contributions to the New Criticism in the20th century.This thesis consists of five chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion, each of which deals with one particular aspect. The first chapter focuses on a biographical introduction to the author, T. S. Eliot, and a literary review of The Love Song both at home and abroad. At the end of this part, the reason why psychoanalysis is employed to study this poem is explained to give explicitly a direction to the next chapter. The second chapter mainly concerns about the methodology, Sigmund Freud’s theory of unconscious and the theory of personality structure on which to base the interpretation of the next chapter. The third chapter is the most important one, aiming at elaborating Prufrock’s delay of action in examining Prufrock’s personality structure and his psychological conflicts. The fourth chapter mainly analyzes how Eliot applies his theory of "impersonality" to the character of Prufrock and how the poem projects his own personality. Chapter Five reemphasizes the theme of this thesis and explains the significance of the study.