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 manifesto which defined the movement in philosophical and psychological terms. Moreover, Eliot would later show indifference, incomprehension and at times hostility toward surrealism and its precursor Dada.

Eliot's favourites among his French contemporaries weren't surrealists, but were rather the figures of St. John Perse and Paul Verlaine, among others. This does not mean Eliot had nothing in common with surrealist poetry, but the facts that both Eliot and the Surrealists owed much to Charles Baudelaire's can perhaps best explain any similarity "strangely evocative explorations of the symbolic suggestions of objects and images." Its unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions often characterize sur

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is not generally described as a surrealistic poem, but if the definition of surrealism combines dreams, the un- or sub-consciousness' and symbolic meaning through objects and imagery, the landscape of the poem 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.

realism, by which it tries to transcend logic and habitual thinking, to reveal deeper levels of meaning and of unconscious associations. Although scholars might not classify Eliot as a Surrealist, the surreal landscape, defined as "an attempt to express the workings of the subconscious mind by images without order, as in a dream " is exemplified in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

back to the horror and dream like (nightmare) of the world originally mentioned. The yellow fog which, according to Eliot, is the factory smoke from St. Louis that blew across the Mississippi, is referred as a type of beast, probably a cat. The fog "rubs its back upon the windowpanes, "licks it's tongue" "made a sudden leap and "Curled once about the house, and fell asleep." The image of the cat is often u

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1013
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)