After reading "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" for the umpteenth time in one of my classes, the experience was surprisingly made new because of how we were told to read it. In the class I read it in we are studying Functionalism, a theory that says the main purpose of art is to convey experience. In order to read the aforementioned poem in a functionalist manner, we were told to try and just experience it without analyzing it and putting it in its historical and biographical contexts of modernism and post-war depression. After I just let the poem be, I realized that I could've felt the same general feelings of depression and hopelessness even if I hadn't known about the context.
The poem stood on its own. I like the point that functionalism makes when it says that you don't need the author's intent or any sort of context to determine whether a work is a success because its success will be
self-evident just from reading it. A successful poem will make us experience something universal. "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" is definitely a "success" and reaches that universal level for me, because even when I stripped away all the knowledge I knew about it and read the poem as if it were my first time, it still made me feel universal human emotions. I hope this makes some kind of sense! Let me allude to the poem when I say that sometimes "It is impossible to say just what I mean!"
Excellent point: real poetry is an appeal to some sensitivity, some quality, some awareness that is in every human being.
ReplyDeleteThat is such an interesting way of looking at poetry. I haven't read a lot of Eliot's poetry, but I do get that same sense of universal meaning when I hear that other people feel the same way I do whenever I read it. The idea that everyone should get the same emotional response from the poem is also a bold and interesting idea.
ReplyDeleteMy sister works at a youth residential treatment center for girls. She told my mom and I that sometimes the girls confide in her their really deviant escapades or their really tragic childhoods. By comparison, my sister leads a plain and ordinary life. Since it is also very apparent that she has bonded really well with these girls, my mom asked, "So how do you respond when a girl tells you like, 'I used to be a crack addict.' ...Do you say, 'I know what you mean. I used to be addicted to chapstick'...?" My sister said, "Of course not, you don't try to one up them! But you can identify with the feelings they have. You don't have to be an ex-crack addict to have felt shame, for example."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if the title of this post was in reference to Robert Cormiere's The Chocolate War, but I just finished reading that novel for a class and it made me SO excited to see this post. (GREAT book).
ReplyDeleteIf it's not in reference, that's okay too because I loved the content of your post as well as the title! I agree with you, though in theatre we call it a formalist point of view, that a great work of literature will contain it's own meaning and be able to stand on it's own. Very cool!
Oh wow! I meant formalism!! haha
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