SOURCE: “Action and the Absence of Speech in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’,” in Yeats Eliot Review, Vol. 9, No. 4, Summer, 1988, pp. 145-8.

In the following essay, Bentley argues that Prufrock's failures are the result of his inability to articulate his needs.

Late in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the demoralized persona sums himself up with the poignant line. “And in short, I was afraid.” Commentators on the poem usually assume that he is afraid of women, afraid of people, afraid of life itself. He is thus regarded as a pitiful neurotic and a failed dandy. I do not wish to dispute these commentaries. As far as they go they are correct even though they fail to see the aspect of Prufrock which can almost be called heroic. But when we read the poem with an awareness that Eliot was an apprentice philosopher when he...