Beginning of Essay
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" tells the story of a single character, a timid, middle-aged man. Prufrock is talking or thinking to himself. The epigraph, a dramatic speech taken from Dante's "Inferno," provides a key to Prufrock's nature. Like Dante's ch ....

Middle of Essay
.... they classify him and he feels he deserves the classification, because he has put on a face other than his own. "To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." He has always done what he was socially supposed to do, instead of yielding to his own natural feelings. He wrestles with his desires to change his world and with his fear of their rejection. He imagines how foolish he would feel if he were to make his proposal only to discover that the woman had never thought of him as a possible lover; he imagines her brisk, cruel response; "That is not what I meant, at all." He imagines that she will want his head on a platter and they did with the ....