SOURCE: “‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ as a Cubist Poem,” in English Studies in Africa, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1983, pp. 129-39.

In the following essay, Leveson explains the influence of Cubist art on “Prufrock.”

I

The year 1910-1911 in Paris marked the focal point of that extraordinary intellectual and artistic revolution of the beginning of the twentieth century known as Modernism. The unfamiliar sounds and rhythms of Stravinsky's music were heard from the stage where Diaghilev's Ballets Russes were performing the Firebird ballet. Poincaré introduced a fourth dimension to Euclidean mathematics. The philosopher, Henri Bergson, was attracting large crowds to his lectures at the Collège de France. Marinetti and others published a manifesto of Futurism in Le Figaro. Guillaume Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein championed the new school of Cubist painters whose exhibitions were shocking the public in two major Parisian salons.

Across the Atlantic, the poetically-minded student...