ABSTRACT

Music is the art of thinking in sounds. The Boston of Eliot's early years was no Vienna, but the forms of life were no less elaborate, self-consciously artificial, and conventionalized. The musical forms that brought the sort of attention to the performer were the smaller, more intimate ones for solo recitalist: the nocturne, the prelude, the song, or the rhapsody for a single instrument. The rhapsody was one of a number of free forms of music that became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century and in which the display of a performer's emotional intensity, and, therefore, a revelation of personality, was as much the purpose of the musical occasion as the making of music for its own sake. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" accomplishes something in the domain of song. "Prufrock" is the third of this group of early lyrics that Eliot first set down in the 1910-11 period.