English Literature and Linguistics

Literature, Philosophy, and Mythology Dante Alighieri,  Inferno , Canto 27, lines 61-66 (epigraph) Andrew Marwell, "To His Coy Mistress" (line 23, first reference) Hesiod, Works and Days  (line 29) William Shakespeare ,  Twelfth Night (line 5 William Shakespeare,  Hamlet  (lines 111-119) The Bible, Luke 16:19-31, (lines 94-95) Historical References Michelangelo (lines 13-14, lines 35-36) Lazarus(lines 94-95)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Themes Love It’s hard to tell whether Prufrock is really in love with the person he is talking to. He speaks about himself a lot, and he ignores her, or "us," for most of the poem. Maybe he’s too s... Manipulation The poem’s epigraph is a quotation of Guido da Montefeltro, a particularly manipulative chap who finds a place near the bottom of Dante’s Hell in Inferno. Right away, this epigraph sets... Passivity Oh, Prufrock, why didn’t you just go into your lover’s "chamber" and ask her your darned "overwhelming question" when you had the chance?! Prufrock is the dramatic equivalent of a bump... Time In relation to time, this poem is a total trip. It ricochets back and forth between the past and the future, almost never settling on the present. One moment Prufrock is talking about all the thing... Appearances There seem to be no complete human beings in this poem. There are only bits and pieces of people:

1. Introduction In the epigraph to  The Waste Land  the Sybil, a woman with prophetic abilities, looks at the future and proclaims that the only thing she wants is to die. Her pessimism about the future is the first indication of the idea which develops into the central theme of the poem: the decay of the human civilization. In this paper I am going to concentrate on interpretation of the motif of decay and its meanings in  The Waste Land . The poem was published in 1922 and appears to be a typical literary example of Modern poetry. That’s why I decided to adopt the New Critical perspective for my paper. New Criticism is the literary theory which dominated in the early 20th century and was used especially for interpretations of poetry. In this paper I will refer to the main statements of the New Critical theory described by I. A. Richards. [1] The New Criticical approach states that every literary text is  autonomous . Historical context and biography of the author are irrelevant fo