Define literary Modernism as a reaction to early-20th-century disillusionment, and analyze fragmentation, interior monologue, and literary allusion in Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Literary Modernism emerges in the early 20th century, especially after the disillusionment of the First World War, rejecting the confident, orderly forms of 19th-century literature in favor of fragmentation, uncertainty, and formal experimentation that better mirrors a world that no longer felt orderly or certain. T.S. Eliot's 1915 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is an early landmark of this shift: an interior monologue, a poem staged entirely inside one anxious mind's circling private thoughts, narrated by a man paralyzed by indecision and social anxiety, unable to act on desires he can barely admit even to himself.
The poem announces its break from earlier convention immediately with a jarring, clinical simile: "the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table," replacing traditional poetic beauty with something closer to a hospital. Prufrock's anxieties are famously trivial in scale -- "Do I dare to eat a peach?" -- yet genuinely paralyzing in their effect on him, and a fog described through an extended metaphor as a cat ("rubs its back upon the window-panes"..."curled once about the house, and fell asleep") drifts through the poem as an image of his own hesitation. The poem closes on a classical allusion turned inward as self-doubt rather than triumph: "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me" -- measuring his own life against a larger, more heroic possibility he believes he has already missed.
Mastery looks like: They can define interior monologue and identify at least two Modernist techniques (fragmentation, ironic allusion, extended metaphor) at work in specific passages of the poem.
Common stumbles: Expecting the poem to resolve into a clear narrative rather than accepting fragmentation as a deliberate Modernist technique; missing that the mermaids allusion functions ironically rather than as straightforward classical elevation.