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Bartz1 Olivia BartzShortHonors HumcoreJune 7, 2012Prufrock’s Hell and other Dantean Parallels in Eliot’s Love Song In looking at discussions on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, there is not a shortage of analyses on the poem. A collection of authors delves into Prufrock’s battle with love against the backdrop of an intimate social gathering. Scholars agree that there is something amiss about this love poem—its unusually and jarringly named speaker suggests a paradoxical lack of romanticism in the poem. The poem is not really a love song but a lamentation by a frustrated man over his inability to find love and secure it for himself. However, despite these many analyses on the poem, many choose to either mention the epigraph from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno as a brief aspect to the poem or as a suggestion to look for any allusions to Dante’s work in the love song. Few examine the specific text and speaker of the epigraph.The Epigraph at the head of Eliot’s poem comes from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno in his Divine Comedy and is spoken by Guido da Montefeltro to the fictional Dante. Guido is sentenced to the eighth rung of Hell after being tricked by Pope Boniface VII into giving false counsel so that Boniface could overthrow Palestrina1 and thereby advance his own power and position. Guido is at first hesitant to do so but eventually becomes swayed by Boniface’s promise to “lock and to unlock Heaven” and to “absolve thee 1 Palestrina was the fortress for the Ghibelline Colonna family. This family was an enemy of the Pope and held considerable influence in the political affairs of Rome and Southern Italy. They also had influence in papal elections and tended to side with the Emperor in disputes between the Pope and Emperor.
Bartz2 henceforth” (Alighieri 27:100-105). As Jay Dougherty writes, “Thus, Guido, ‘brought to the point where silence seemed to me the worst offence,’ commits what he knows to be a sin” (Dougherty 39). Guido is thus damned to live in the eighth rung of Hell that punishes “false counsel” where he meets the fictional Dante who is just a visitor of Hell. Part of Guido’s punishment is that he is encased in a flame of his own consciousness and his speech is therefore inhibited. He feels a desire to share his identity, however, and decides to confide in Dante, who he mistakes for one of the damned, because he believes Dante will never again reach earth and therefore, never retell his story. Before he shares his identity with Dante, he tells him, “If I thought my answer were given / to anyone who would ever return to the world, / this flame would stand still without moving any further. / But since never from this abyss / has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true, / without fear of infamy I answer you” (27:61-66). And this warning from Guido is the epigraph to Eliot’s poem. With this, Prufrock takes the reader on his journey, reveals his identity, and Guido’s story becomes his own. In looking at the relation of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrockto its epigraph from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the poem can be read as a collection of allusions to the Inferno. However, the context and content of Guido da Montefeltro’s speech is the most compelling parallel: like Guido, Prufrock inhabits his own Hell manifested in his relationship with Boston society in the early 1900’s. Prufrock acquires a new self in this society that is divided from his actual feelings and identity and this inner struggle becomes paralyzing. He struggles to gain the courage to search for life and meaning in this destitute damnation, despite his very clear image of salvation that he holds in his