Thompson Harrison

 

 

​

On Freedom

from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

T.S. Eliot

​

Theme

This month we’re thinking about freedom. Particularly, how freedom operates within a framework. Improvisation is important, and businesses have to be flexible in their responses or else risk stagnation, but it’s important, too, to improvise within given parameters, to make sure that creative responsiveness is also responsible. With that in mind, we turn to this month’s poet, who knows an awful lot about the freedoms (and frameworks) of verse. 

​

from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

​

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

​

Read the full poem here.

​

Who?

T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) is a pretty infamous name—both within the poetry world and without. He’s often considered to be the Godfather of modern poetry. Indeed, he is perhaps the most important Modernist of the early 20th century (more of which you can read about here and here). Alongside his friend and collaborator, Ezra Pound, Eliot wrote difficult verse that tested the reader’s knowledge of literary history, and played fast and loose with established poetic forms, making it a sensation at the time. He was a great innovator, but knew that experiment replies on a deep understanding and appreciation of tradition. 

​

What?

Eliot was, in fact, an early proponent of ‘free verse’, which allows the poet to take liberties with their metrical forms and rhyming schemes. We can see him doing this in the poem above, which is an extract from his dramatic monologue ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (you can read more about dramatic monologues here). 

​

The monologue is spoken or thought by our titular Purfrock, a man approaching middle-age. Purfrock is thinking back over his life and Eliot is able to make use of free verse to better depict the rhythms of his mind, which are very rarely straight forward. Prufrock’s lines swell and shrink as he wonders and worries: ‘Do I dare’ becomes a refrain, like a nagging thought, which first appears as part of a line in classic iambic pentameter. When it returns, however, it has a line all to itself, as though the question is growing in importance. 

​

By doing this, Eliot’s verse becomes responsive to the demands of its subject. Businesses, too, must be able to freely adapt. John Antioco, then-CEO of Blockbuster, famously said ‘the dot-com hysteria is completely overblown’. How wrong he was! Blockbuster failed to adapt, and now Netflix is king (read more about it here). 

​

What Else?

Eliot also knew that freedom only works when it is played out against an established structure. Indeed, in his famous essay on free verse, he wrote that ‘the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse’ (an ‘arras’ is a kind of curtain). Later in ‘Prufrock’ we get the line ‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’—see how Eliot’s form becomes a classic iambic pentameter (count the five beats) when referencing Shakespeare, the most famous writer of this metre. It’s a kind of joke, and it’s only possible because the rest of the poem has such rhythmic freedom. 

​

Eliot can make a new kind of poetry – and a new way of representing the stops and starts of the mind – only by referencing what has come before: for him, this is true freedom.