"Prufrock" between Acquaintance and Description: Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot

This article recovers a submerged philosophical debate between Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions and T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Russell’s concern with immediate experience (“acquaintance”) underscores a dilemma troubling literary modernism generally and modernist abstraction in particular. In “Prufrock,” acquaintance with reality marks an epistemic failure whose social form is the “etherization” gripping the city and everything in it. The conversation between Russell’s philosophy and Eliot’s poetry is grounded in but exceeds the men’s real-life acquaintance. Rather than influence, at stake is a circulation of ideas between philosophy and modernist poetry and the questions of knowledge raised by both.

Duke Scholars

Author Maya Kronfeld Literature