Compare the way in which Yeats and Eliot write about...

Compare the ways in which Eliot and Yeats write about relationships between men and women- in the response you must include detailed critical discussion of at least two Eliot poems. In T.S. Eliot’s Portrait of a Lady and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, themes of insecurity, masculinity, propriety and theatricality are addressed. Similarly, W.B. Yeats also draws upon these themes in his poem He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven. Both poets successfully weave these characteristic ideas so skillfully that the reader obtains a real sense of relationships in modern society. In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the narrative voice is one of a neurotic, pathetic man who manages to be both vain and insecure at the same time. Eliot†¦show more content†¦Prufrock is so forlorn that he asserts ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’. This denotes his self-pitying manner and announces that he places himself at the bottom of the social order, ‘floors of silent seas’ being the lowest point one can reach before descending into the molten core of the earth. He compares himself to a crab, a detritus feeder that cannot hunt its own prey and instead relies on scavenging the victories of others. Crabs are also solitary animals and this is perhaps Eliot having Prufrock admit that there isn’t time and he resigned to a life alone. ‘Scuttling’ is a verb that suggests sideways movement, highly indicative of Prufrock’s inertia and failure to move forwards with his life. His emasculation was typical of men in his day, affected by the aftershocks of the Great War, where they struggled to find their place in a radically altered society, where the foundations of the once great British Empire were crumbling. Prufrock is so concerned with his masculinity that he is hypersensitive to the voices of others, which say â€Å"but how his arms and legs are thin†. He feels that he does not represent the masculine ideal that women who talk ‘of Michelangelo’ desire. Prufrock’s tale is made immeasurably tragic when he claims ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ The fact that he can even begin to think of measuring his life indicates how little he has achieved. ‘Coffee spoons’