Eliot's Standing on top of Dead People!: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in Eliot's Early Poems

Of the poems we were assigned, “Preludes” seems to be incongruent with the others. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady”and“La Figlia che Piange” deal with different types of love. There is the middle aged lust of “…Prufrock,” the budding friendship of “Portrait…,” and the broken heartedness of “La Figlia…” “Preludes,” on the other hand, deals with an undefined sin, evidenced by the “sordid images” and “soiled hands.” The poem explores the morning after a night of decadence and debauchery as the subject recovers from a night of drinking and begins to remember what transpired and possibly recognize the condemnation of his soul.

Some of the common features of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” and “La Figlia che Piange” are that they bear epigraphs of great writers. Eliot leans on “the dead poets, his ancestors,” Virgil, Marlowe, and Dante, to add more depth to his poems. This refers back to “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the first section of which focuses on the involvement that dead poets have in influencing living poets. With these poems, he emphasizes his assertion that no work is completely individual. He says, “…we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a writer’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Thus, Eliot avows his deftness by incorporating some of his great forerunners.

Prufrock and Other Observations begins with a dedication to Jean Verdenal, who died two years before the first edition was published. The epigraph is of Virgil speaking to Status in Dante’s Purgatorio saying, “Now canst thou the sum of love which warms me to thee comprehend, when this our vanity I disremember, treating a shadow as substantial thing” (Canto XXI, 133-136).

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins with Dante’s The Inferno. “If I believed that my answer were to a person who should ever return to the world, this flame would stand without further movement; but since never one returns alive from this deep, if I hear true, I answer you without fear of infamy” (Canto XXVII, 60-66). Eliot’s poems actually deals with a middle aged man’s insecurity, which calls for such absolute secrecy as found in Dante. According to Eliot’s essay “Hamlet” and James Torrens’s “Eliot’s Essays: A Bridge to the Poems,” Eliot not only stands on the shoulders of Dante but gets a boost from Shakespeare’s, as well. He forms the Prufrock character as a combination of Hamlet, who is older and “overmature in thoughts” and Polonius, who is also an older man but is immature. This creates an internal conflict in the poem between Prufrock’s mature age and his youthful, lusty ambitions.

“Portrait of a Lady” pulls its title from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and bares an epigraph extracted from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta. It reads, “Thou hast committed—/ Fornication; but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead.” Similar to the dexterity Eliot shows in “…Prufrock,” “Portrait…” incorporates Jamesian elements and Marlowian conflict into this poem.

“La Figlia che Piange,” which means “The Weeping Girl” looks back to Virgil’s The Aeneid for its epigraph, “O, how am I to speak of you, maiden?” Eliot chooses to speak of this maiden in the same manner that a play director or playwright would. He describes and defines her through a series of commands or directions.