Eliot's the Love Song of Term Paper

That is not it, at all." (Eliot, 875)

In these lines the poet makes a play upon words with the word "all": it is either to know all, or else not to be able to render one's meaning in a work of art. Eliot finds it impossible to actually unveil the mystery and tell all, it is not only that complete knowledge of the universe is impossible, but that the mystery even when reached and experienced, as when hearing the luring song of the mermaids, it can not be told.

This distance from mystery is due also to the modernist consumerist society, as Daly noticed in his study:

Where Marx imagined commodity fetishism coming to an end only with the demise of capitalism itself, Hemingway sees a new relation to objects arising through a qualitative change in the subject, through a mutation in appetite T.S. Eliot's typically ineffectual modern subject, J.Alfred Prufrock, has to wonder if he dares to eat a peach [..] "(Daly, 152)

Thus, the main theme of the poem is the discrepancy between modernism and the primitive, between daily life and the dream world, all these being dualities, not oppositions, and being at the very core of artistic creation, as part of human experience as such.

Works Cited

Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance & the "Fin de Siecle": Popular Fiction & British Culture.

Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2000

Eliot, Thomas Stearns The Oxford Book of Verse, New York: Bartleby, 1999

Ferrall, Charles. Modernist Writing & Reactionary Politics.

Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2001

Goldman, Jane. Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apocalypse.

Gordonsville,….....