Surrealism and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Surrealism is a dangerous word to use about the poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot, and certainly with his first major work, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock '. Eliot wrote the poem, after all, years before Andre Breton and his compatriots began defining and practicing 'surrealism' proper. Andre Breton published his first 'Manifesto of Surrealism' in 1924, seven years after Eliot's publication of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. It was this …

…may fit this classification. The reader is taken on a journey through the mind and the city of a lonely, bitter and ostracized man named J. Alfred Prufrock. His emotional and social states are reflected through the landscape of the city and the sky above: dark, empty and smothering. Not all surrealistic works are dark like this poem, but the timeless, paradoxical and juxtapositional are what makes 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' surrealistic.