Modernism - T.S. Eliot's Preludes & Prufrock

... Modernism was the cultural movement in which innovation and experimentation of art and literature was celebrated and explored as a reaction against the formality and optimism of the preceding Victorian period. Thomas Stearns Eliot was a Modernist literary figure who contributed significantly to the movement in the early to mid 1900s. In Eliot's "Preludes" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T. S. Eliot reveals some of the major concerns of his context linked to happenings on the cultural and industrial fronts; that is, urban decay, social entrapment and the fragmentation of Victorian England. He examines the effects of these on the lives of human beings and laments the emptiness, futility, destructiveness and cynicism of life in the modern world. Eliot's Preludes conveys the mundane and repetitive nature of people's lives in 1911. The title itself is ironic in the sense that a prelude is and introductory piece which precedes something

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