High Culture in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Friend or Foe? Anonymous College

High culture bears a great significance in Eliot’s poetry and in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock he expresses its significance in life and the valuable lessons it can provide. He also manifests his concerns about culture’s influence on his contemporaries but also about “the burden of vision” (Atkins 136) that the artist has to bear. Prufrock tries to escape the loneliness he feels by looking for wisdom in the past but even though high culture seems to be a friend that provides momentary solace, deep down it makes him more detached from his environment and more aloof. Should the artist resort to high culture in his effort to escape the impersonal and pretentious reality or is it just another mask behind which he tries to hide from life? For Eliot culture is the force that connects the past, the present and the future, the very thing that makes civilizations and societies advance and it includes art, history, religion and myths. The artist is a part of that cultural history that has shaped his world but he also has the power and even responsibility to change it and alter it and as Eliot has pointed out: “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which...