The Realm of Prufrock and Dante: Could There Be A Connection between Hell and Love Song?

An unfamiliar bar of sentences, written in Italian, preceded one of T. S. Elliot’s greatest works, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Assume that this is the first time a reader finds his poem with zero knowledge in Italian, not to mention Dante’s Inferno. Why would he feature the excerpt from Dante’s Inferno in his poem (without bothering much to translate it to English)? Could it be there for aesthetic purposes as modernist literature has enormously changed in the terms of style and form? Could that excerpt possibly holds specific meaning or even influences the whole storyline of the poem? As we know, one of the characteristics of modernist literature is intertextuality, which is the act of inserting allusions or references from other works that not only have strong connection with the recent work but also enable the readers to have deeper understanding about the meaning of the work. Therefore, it is apparent that the epigraph is specifically connected with the “love song”.

The epigraph was cited from the 27^th chapter of Dante’s Inferno, where it is told that Dante had reached the eighth circle of hell and encountered his old teacher, Guido da Montefeltro. Driven by his curiosity, Dante asked Guido about what could be the background of his punishment. Guido’s answer, translated to English, was: “If I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker. But since, up from these depths, no one has yet returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer without fear of being shamed”. To explain it analogically, I would say that the connection between the epigraph and the poem is equal to the flashback scenes in the beginning of a movie, where the past event that causes the current conflict was told. In order to understand the movie as a whole, we have to watch it from the beginning.

Likewise, there is an implicit request to understand the epigraph-referenced from Inferno-in order to resonate strongly to Prufrock’s situation. “Let us go then, you and I” reminds his reader to buckle up and opens the gate for a journey to hell, except in Prufrock’s case, it is a metaphorical hell. Just like how Guido, the damned soul, opened up to the Dante, the reader has been granted the privilege to listen to Prufrock’s ironic “love song”, which contains his internal wrestling and inferiority complex. Throughout the poem, we find Prufrock having a soliloquy with himself, dominated by his hesitation to approach the woman that sparks his interest and to engage in a conversation in a social gathering. He presumes and presumes, seized by his own uncertain fear of rejection, creating his own circles of hell; one resides within his soul and the other one present in the society. The reader, who is the only person who can listen to his love song, is also experiencing “hell” as it is frustrating to watch him being indecisive and constantly presuming.

Here, we can finally decipher the connection between the epigraph and poem as the resemblance between Prufrock and the damned soul is clearly visible. While Guido is the damned soul in literal hell, Prufrock is the damned soul in the society. They both refuse to open up to the outer world; the society, in Prufrock’s case, because of their fear of judgement. However, instead of building up the courage to initiate a conversation, he chooses to stay in “hell”, which is his catastrophic mind. He keeps the love song close between him and the reader rather than singing it out loud. While the damned souls face eternal judgement in hell due to their nefarious act, Prufrock stays in the eternal state of self-denigration and inferiority while longing for social acceptance. All in all, it is still vague whether his suffering is his own creation of mind or due to the enormous impact of modernization. For all I know, it is only ourselves that are fully capable to change our way of thinking, before we change the society.