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T. S. Eliot’S ‘Obscurity’ In The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, Longxing Wei

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

T. S. Eliot’s earliest verse is composed of observations, detached, ironic, and alternatively disillusioned and nostalgic in tone. Eliot’s mingling of subtle observation with unexpected cliché represents a difficulty that is often magnified because too much ’obscurity’ is assumed. This paper aims at clarifying the ’obscurity’ by means of a stylistic analysis of the linguistic devices that the poet used to create "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and its intended meaning. Adopting the concept of style as ’foregrounding’, the idea that style is constituted by departures from linguistic norms, it analyzes the poem in terms of its lexical …