Modern Physics and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

As one of T.S. Eliot's best-known (and certainly most frequently analyzed) poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has had many themes and meanings assigned to it since its 1915 publication. The frustration and ennui of a Europe slouching towards war, one man's psychological dissonance, an examination of libidinous violence: all of these interpretations and more are available in the critical studies of this work. One aspect of this work, however, that is frequently not addressed is the philosophical change that Western cultures were experiencing due to then-recent scientific advances, specifically the theory of relativity and the concomitant rise of quantum theory. In looking at Prufrock, one can see a great deal of textual evidence that Eliot was using the very concepts of modern physics as psychological metaphors in the construction of this poem, such as singularities and the uncertainty principle, in some cases before their popular conceptions became well-known.

Eliot's integration of what were undoubtedly considered esoteric concepts into the subtextual underpinnings of Prufrock may seem unlikely at first, but one has to keep in mind the time period in which Prufrock was written. Albert Einstein had already published and made waves with the theory of relativity, which had set the old Newtonian model of the universe on its ear with the radical idea that certain events were dependent on one's position relative to the event. Quantum theory had been developing since roughly 1900 ("Quantum Theory-Early Developments," 1), and the basic concepts were readily available (if not always understandable) to the educated public, a stratum of society in which Eliot would certainly have been considered a member.

Although Eliot was not a scientist by inclination, he was certainly familiar with scientific concepts, as Jeffrey Walker pointed out when describing Eliot's "famous account of the poetic mind as a catalytic 'platinum shred' inserted into the crucible of tradition" (65), illustrating at least a passing familiarity with a few basic chemistry principles. Given the philosophical questions that the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were raising in the early part of the century, it seems highly unlikely Eliot would not have been at least passingly aware of them, and more than likely ready to use what was understood about them then metaphorically. The fact that some of what Eliot wrote in Prufrock is illustrative of concepts that had not yet been formally defined can be seen not only as evidence of Eliot's understanding of the early concepts, but in his skill in utilizing them as imaginative, yet logical, metaphors.

Although not delving into the specifics of the connections between modern physics and Prufrock, other critics have made note of related aspects, such as how Eliot manipulated concepts of space and time in fashions other than the linear. In an essay printed in the 1965 collection Poets of Reality, J. Hillis Miller noted that the narrator, similar to his ability to relate to other consciousnesses in the poem, "has an equally unhappy relation to time and space... However far Prufrock goes, he remains imprisoned in his own subjective space" (Esty, 1). Miller goes on to make a similar argument about Prufrock's relationship to time, which makes sense in that modern physics recognizes space and time to be integral parts of the fabric of the universe, but what is important to recognize in Miller's statement is the idea that Prufrock's conception of space and time - his own continuum, if you will - is a subjective one.

In fact, this conception of space-time is so completely subjective that an objective flow is not perceptible; that is, there is no clearly defined external linearity in the poem. Through this enforced subjective time frame, Prufrock has in fact altered his own apparent procession through objective time, such that "Prufrock's prospective confidence in the fullness of time becomes a retrospective condition that 'I have known them all already, known them all'" (North, 77). By itself, this is an interesting observation, but Miller also raises the question of physical movement, stating that "...one of the puzzles of the poem is the question as to whether Prufrock ever leaves his room. It appears that he does not, so infirm is his will" and later asserting that because of his inability to perceive an objective space, "all his experience is imaginary" and Prufrock is in fact paralyzed in the space-time continuum (Esty, 1). Thus, his observance of one condition (specifically, time) has spread to affect his status of another condition (space).

Miller's analysis of Prufrock's subjective space-time frames illustrates what would become known, more than a decade after Prufrock first appeared, as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Heisenberg gave a succinct definition of his principle in a 1927 paper where he stated: "The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant and vice versa" (Cassidy, 1). In other words, the more attention is paid to where an observed event is, the less is known about its movement, which is exactly the condition we see ascribed to Prufrock. Eliot makes oblique reference to this lack of movement at different points within Prufrock with lines such as "When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall" (Line 58). As we see in Miller's and North's analyses of Prufrock, the narrator has succeeded in stilling his movement in space through his forced subjective time sense, one that is decidedly non-linear - notice how Eliot moves back in forth through time using different tenses within stanzas; as an example, from "And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!" in line 75 to "And would it have been worth it, after all" in line 87. As another critic puts it, within Eliot's poetry, "space and time refuse to remain discreetly in the background" (Albright, 229); these conceptions take an active part in Prufrock.

Another concept from the world of physics that Eliot illustrates with great metaphorical effect is the concept of singularity. In analyzing the stanza that begins on line 49 with "For I have known them all already, known them all," North points out that "to know 'all' already is to be paralyzed, disabled, because 'all is not full of possibility but paradoxically empty," and later, describes the movement as one that "expresses the emptiness between, the gap between dispersed parts and an oppressive whole" (77). In other words, the breakdown of order, a paradoxical state where all is nothing and normal rules do not hold true.

What many critics have seen to be a portrayal of the old order breaking down also happens to describe, in a metaphorical sense, what modern physics holds to be the state of affairs inside a singularity, which is defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as "a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole." Further cementing the idea, Eliot actually gives a now-commonly held conception of a singularity (often referred to as a black hole) form when the narrator says "Would it have been worth while / To have bitten off the matter with a smile / To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (Lines 90-92) {emphasis mine}. While the use of the word "matter" can be interpreted a number of ways, it takes on the mien of a sly play on words if we examine its placement before the line about the universe being squeezed. Such concepts, predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity and thus several years old by the time Prufrock was written, would likely have been discussed publicly by the leading scientific lights of the day (if not necessarily fully grasped), and it seems well within the realm of possibility that Eliot would quickly grasp their metaphoric uses.

(As an aside, it is furthermore interesting to note that just two stanzas later, the narrator avers that he is "not Prince Hamlet," (Eliot, line 111), who as Shakespeare scholars may recall, himself said in conversation with the couriers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he "could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space" (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2). In and of itself, such a term could be said to be a fair description of a singularity. However, ascertaining the depth of knowledge William Shakespeare may have possessed regarding astronomy and quantum physics is beyond the scope of this paper.)

However, in order to understand the metaphorical richness Eliot draws from quantum physics and utilizes to excellent effect, it is necessary to turn in a direction that Eliot himself would have greatly appreciated: cats. Although this particular cat would not make an appearance in the physics journals for another twenty years or so, its footfalls echo in a very definite fashion through Prufrock.

Most traditional essays and analyses of Prufrock focus on the overall feelings of impotence and ennui that the poem excels in expressing; one critic aptly describes Prufrock as a "portrait of a middle-aged man whose life is one of endless indecision" in which "Eliot anticipated the uncertainty and debilitation engendered by World War I" (Woodward, 3-4). But, when considering how Eliot integrated physics concepts into the poem, the term of special interest in that description is not "middle-aged," "uncertainty" or "debilitation": it is "indecision," a term that carries not only one of the master themes of the poem, but also one of the keys to how Eliot uses physics concepts to deepen his meaning. Everything Prufrock does (or, keeping in mind North's analysis, doesn't do) is shaped and defined by his inability to decide, and it is this indecision that keeps Prufrock locked in his subjective space-time frame, unable to progress or step into an objective reality.

It is this indecision that provides the strongest link between Prufrock and the concepts of quantum physics, although the actual formulation of this link would not be created for another twenty years. In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger, a contemporary of Einstein and rival of Heisenberg, described the following thought experiment as a way of illustrating the ramifications of quantum mechanics:

"A cat is placed in a box, together with a radioactive atom. If the atom decays and the Geiger counter detects an alpha particle, a hammer hits a flask of prussic acid, killing the cat. Before the observer opens the box, the cat's fate is tied to the wave function of the atom, which is itself in a superposition of decayed and undecayed states. Thus, said Schrödinger, the cat must itself be in a superposition of dead and alive states before the observer opens the box, "observes" the cat, and "collapses" its wave function" (Louis, 1).

Now we can see a correlation Eliot might have enjoyed: Prufrock becomes the poem's very own Schrödinger's cat. Trapped by his inability to decide, he exists in a state of superposition between subjective and objective frames of reference, between desire and action. Prufrock's "wave function," as it were, is locked into this indeterminate state, alternating between opposing self-views. On one hand, early in the poem, Prufrock thinks his "mind is enormous, stretching up from the argumentative streets, up through the licking fog, all the way up to the etherized sky," but later, when the women are mentioned in the stanza beginning with "And indeed there will be time," Prufrock "becomes, not infinite, but infinitesimal: a pair of ragged claws" (Albright, 230). In neither case does Prufrock reach a collapsed function and reach an objective reality; his indecision prevents the observer (in this case, Prufrock himself) from opening the box.

This state of superposition is also reflected in Eliot's repetition of the word "time" in the fourth stanza, particularly in the stanza's last four lines, where Prufrock relates there will be "Time for you and time for me / And time yet for a hundred indecisions / And for a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of a toast and tea" (Lines 31-34). Again using the concept of indecision, Eliot explicitly outlines the Schrödinger's cat scenario here: there is room in Prufrock's subjective timeframe for many choices and redactions, because the state of indecision has not forced a collapse of possibilities into action. Prufrock even identifies an event that would open the box, so to speak, and force the end of that series of "visions and revisions": toast and tea.

To outline the concept further, Eliot expands on the idea in the sixth stanza's final lines, where Prufrock agonizes over his indecisiveness, and gives it voice: "Do I dare / Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse" (Lines 44-47). Here, Eliot all but underlines the fact in bold black strokes that Prufrock recognizes, at some level, that he knows a decision will force an action that shakes him loose from his subjective haze of timelessness and/or spacelessness; i.e. that his personal wave function will collapse, and one way or the other, he will have a new state of existence to accept and deal with. With this realization, Prufrock does nothing, in keeping with his indecisiveness to date, in fact does not stop to ponder it further. After all, if he was to observe it too long, it might change his momentum (or lack thereof) in his subjective frame in accordance with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and as Eliot was surely aware, Prufrock isn't willing to let that happen.

By embedding scientific concepts and metaphors throughout Prufrock, Eliot did more than simply find fresh imagistic territory to mine in a search for the perfect appropriate metaphor. The concepts of quantum theory, as utilized in Eliot's first major poem, also provided potent psychological thematic elements, so much so that the concepts themselves have been validated without dependence on how they were expressed. Eliot was able to achieve universality with ideas that even today, nearly ninety years after Prufrock's first publication, are not necessarily public intellectual currency, and in addition, was able to find imagistic expressions of ideas that were yet to be expressed.

In bringing science to his art, Eliot was able to help create a new vocabulary for ideas. And, although he didn't intend it, he even managed to get a cat involved in the mix.

Works Cited

Albright, Daniel. Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K. 1997.

Cassidy, David. "Heisenberg - Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927: The Uncertainty Principle." The American Institute of Physics. 2004. The American Institute of Physics. 5 Dec. 2004. .

Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Albertsons Library Electronic Reserve. 5 Dec. 2004. /tempfiles/tmp5499/T.S._Eliot_s_Packet.pdf>.

Esty, Jed, ed. "On 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." T.S. Eliot. 2002. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 5 Dec. 2004. .

Louis, Ard. "Schroedinger's Cat." Schroedinger's Cat. 31 May 1994. Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, Cornell University. 5 Dec. 2004. .

North, Michael. The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K. 1991.

"Quantum Theory - Early Developments." Columbia Encyclopedia - Sixth Edition. 2002. Encyclopedia.com. 5 Dec. 2004. /quantumt_EvolutionofQuantumTheory.asp>.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Project Gutenberg. November 1998. Project Gutenberg. 5 Dec. 2004. .

Walker, Jeffrey. Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem. Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge, LA. 1989.

Woodward, Kathleen. At Last, The Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams. Ohio State University Press: Columbus, OH. 1980.