A Structural Jazz Reading of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady by T. S. Eliot

Subject Areas : Journal of Language, Culture, and Translation

Abdolreza Ohadi ¹ , Hassan Shahabi ^{2 *} , Mehry Haddad Narafshan ³

1 - Department of Foreign Languages, Ke. C., Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran
2 - Department of Foreign Languages, Ke. C., Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran
3 - Department of Foreign Languages, Ke. C., Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran

Received: 2025-06-22 Accepted : 2025-09-28 Published : 2025-09-29

Keywords: T. S. Eliot, Jazz, Music, Poetry, Improvisation,

Abstract :

This article attempts to investigate two poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady, picked from the first significant poem collection by T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations, from a new angle and interdisciplinary point of view, suggesting the poet as a jazz improviser with fragmented phrasings through an asymmetrical structure, and jazz music’s elements in the form of poetry. Having a jazz music perspective based on Ted Gioia’s viewpoints, this study explores the invisible or lesser-known aspects of Eliot’s poetry that have been less seen in the shadow of his contemporary popular music’s footprint in an allusive sense rather than a formal impact. This interdisciplinary study, which links literature and music, presents a novel perspective on discourse analysis. It examines the text as a series of musical sounds analyzed through the lens of a specific genre, jazz, reflecting the sonic landscape of the poet's era. Eliot utilizes his era’s soundscape as a jazz improviser in musical layers of rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, timbre, and form. Moreover, his jazz-shaped structure of poetry reflects its impact on the selection of imagery in the collection. In the end, it is concluded that Eliot, as a modern poet, has distinguished his verse works from his past and contemporaries by designating jazz music’s structural characteristics in his first significant poem collection as a tool for objective correlation in the structural layer of verse in the trajectory of his art’s improvised composition and his unique jazz musicality in poetry.

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