SOURCE: “Prufrock, Freud, and Others,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. 75, Autumn, 1968, pp. 571-88.

In the following essay, Halverson provides a psychoanalytic reading of the sexual elements in “Prufrock.”

It is hardly possible to find any criticism of Eliot's “Prufrock” that does not assert an important strain of sexuality in the poem. There is nearly uniform agreement that in the poem Prufrock wants to propose to a lady, or at least declare his passion, but is finally too timid to do so. “J. Alfred Prufrock is unable to make love to women of his own class and kind because of shyness, self-consciousness, and fear of rejection,” says Delmore Schwartz. And Grover Smith: “His object is to declare himself to a lady,” but he is beset by a “dread” of “sexual insufficiency”. Elizabeth Drew refers to Prufrock's “terror of social and sexual failure”. Roy Basler asks, “How should he begin to...