We have entered a modern age. We are definitely making progress as a race, my brothers and sisters. Humanity has begun to realize it's full potential it could be said, and there is evidence for such a proposition everywhere. Buildings that tower above us and reach for the heavens, technology as big as our hand (or even smaller) that allows us to talk to someone on the other side of the world, devices that can destroy a whole city and wipe out thousands of lives, rockets to the moon, the concept of the unconscious mind, transport to almost every square mile on the face of the planet, and so on and so on. I'm sure there's evidence of progress there somewhere. Take art for example. As German poet Rainer Maria Rilke said 'Art, as I conceive it, is a movement contrary to nature'. So, in respect to the evidence we have already considered for progress, we can say that art belongs purely to man (for although only God can make a tree; only man can make a fragmenting explosive). We can say that with certainty, because God died somewhere near the beginning of this century. Killed by a shell blast...or something like that.

The modernist poet is the best example of the idea that humanity is beginning to realize its potential for unstoppable progress and inevitable stagnation. A modernist rejects the proponents and doctrine of the past while writing about it, explores man as the creator and destroyer ( in a subjective examination of objectivity, mind you), is infatuated with technology and therefore laments it, and campaigns strenuously for the order of chaos. The modernist is as fragmented (and riddled with paradox) as his time, the modern age.

Modernists believed that a fractured generation deserved the 'response' of fractured art. An art which presented a reality so fragmented that the popular belief that modernist art was anti-realist is justifiable. However, there is not as marked deviance from consensus reality within the work of a modernist such as T.S. Eliot. Not at first glance anyway. The astute reader will notice the implications of asking questions for which no answer is immediately available. Questions which plumb the very chambers of our culture and society looking for evidence that the modernist; that J. Alfred Prufrock, if he took the chance; should feel no shame in departing (a radical departure) on a journey of his own. A journey which requires no permission, justification nor even interest from our fellow man. Why are we so dependent on the other's opinion?

"Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?"

'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' can be regarded as Eliot's encapsulation of the concerns and even the character of the modernist. For just as it's main character, Prufrock, has "...known the eyes already, known them all-", a characteristic of the modernist is his recognition of his own 'unremitting self-consciousness'. The modernist seeks to break free from any recognized form, from constraint, and has constructed its own myth that artistic work is formless. In the same manner, J. Alfred Prufrock recognizes that he is held within an unrelenting gaze which restricts his actions, his thoughts and his speech.

" And indeed there will be time
To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'..."

"When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?"

However, Prufrock does not make the departure that the modernist does, and so provides something of a contrast. Eliot seems to be presenting a character which personifies a part of every modernist. He has often been quoted: 'The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality'. J. Alfred Prufrock recognizes and questions the restrictions and politics that are thrust upon him by his environment, just as the modernist does, and yet he illustrates what occurs if a modernist (or anyone, for that matter) fails to make their 'departure' into the world of the unconscious - if the artist is paralyzed by their apprehension after asking:

"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?"

The enemy of the artist has become the bourgeois, and the modernist seeks to shake them from their complacency. Even Prufrock recognizes that true understanding, appreciation and 'truth' does not result simply from acknowledgment of what is 'popularly artistic':

"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."

The artist has become avant gardist - he marches into territory previously left unexplored or underdeveloped due to either a fear of what is to be found, or an ignorance of its benefit. The unconscious has often been seen as this realm into which the modernist descends, and as a result, many of the concepts and images that are summoned from this 'other world' are symbolic - archetypal - and may result in an understandable confusion as to where the modernists devotion lies (symbolism or realism?):

"...When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table..."

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each."

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

Indeed it has been suggested that T.S. Eliot's poem, in it's entirety, is somewhat metaphysical in nature. William H. Pritchard writes that 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is full of 'nervous ghosts' and more than poetry is a kind of 'haunting music'.

It was Ezra Pound, another prime example of a modernist poet and imagist (Imagiste being a term he seems to have 'coined' himself), who gave something of a credo to all modernists when he stated that everything produced by these artists should be new. It should break free of the constraints of form imposed upon it and declare that art had no boundaries, no rules, no real regulations (although even modernism has become something of a regulated 'form'!) and should instead not only ask "do I dare?", but show the world what happens when you do - what happens when you are bestowed with the title of 'Modernist'.

"...Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool."