A quest is a journey, an adventure, seeking or looking for something that you feel there is a need to find. Robert Frost's "Directive" and T.S. Eliot`s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are poems of quest. Both men have chosen different quests for their poems. Quest that they feel the reader needs to seek out and become aware of. As there is a quest, there is also something that they want the reader to not be aware of. Thus going away from the quest, toward a new direction.

Both authors were going through different stages in their lives and were having different problems when they wrote these poems. Frost, a very depressed figure dealt with a lot of tragedy in his lifetime. It seemed as if all that were around him family wise, died leaving him lonely and depressed. This explains the gloominess in...