LITERARY CRITICISM Study the extract given below and answer the questions that follow. Eliot's earliest masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," was published in Poetry magazine in 1915. Written as a dramatic monologue, the poem is an examination of the soul of a timid man paralysed by indecision and worry about his appearance to others, particularly women. Anxious about becoming bald, and about his thin arms and legs, Prufrock hesitates in making even the smallest decisions or actions, wondering: "Do I dare/ Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." Eliot's first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared in 1917. Two well-known early poems are "Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1919). which features an aggressive, fun-loving hero who is the opposite of Prufrock, and "Gerontion" (1920), which was originally designed as a prologue to the longer poem The Waste Land. "Gerontion" is a glimpse into the soul of an old man whose dreamlike memories wander through Western history from the 5th century to the 20th century.
