Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Preludes’ suggest that the world is place of disorder and isolation; this understanding complicates the search for truth. The exploration of his time and place attempt to impose an order of society which the persona’s contradictorily feel is impossible. Stemmed from the cataclysmic consequences of World War I, Eliot’s poetic engagement investigates the role of truth and difficulty of having a unified understanding of the world. This is further explored within the establishing importance of the urban cityscape and the moral instability of the human condition. Eliot’s ambivalent engagement with the concept of truth, revealed through ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Preludes’, unifies his poetic corpus by acknowledging …show more content…
Personal isolation is the dominant mood of ‘Prufrock’. Despite the opening which offers the exhortation to another “let us go there, you and I” which suggests the speaker has at least one companion, the difficulties of relationships is made clear by the simile “streets that follow like a tedious argument”. Just as the speaker seeks to engage with another, he finds the interaction overwhelming switching from soft commands to “let us” to negative strong modal imperatives such as “do not ask”. This concept is also a strong in Part III of ‘Preludes’. The solitude of the night prompts internal reflection “the thousand sordid images… flickering against the ceiling”, while the sense of isolation is emphasised by “some infinitely gentle / infinitely suffering thing”. The indefinite personified “thing” makes the sense of isolation even more profound. In situations where the subject is confronted with isolation, the personal experience of loneliness in the modern city becomes the kind of truth, one not sought, but which dominates the tone of the both these texts. ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Preludes’ reflect Modernist concerns regarding our relationship with the metropolis of the industrialised world and continues to engage contemporary readers with this existential