Langues & Cultures
Volume 7, Numéro 1, Pages 209-226
2026-04-15
The Language Of Anxiety: A Stylistic Reading Of T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock
Authors : Hatto-ahiaduvor Timothy . Lawer Richard Ayertey . Sam Jemima .
Abstract
This study presents a stylistic analysis of T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, exploring how linguistic structures articulate modernist anxiety, paralysis, and fragmentation. Drawing on Finch’s (2003) model of textual analysis and Mills’s (1995) feminist stylistics, the paper examines five levels of linguistic organization, phonological, syntactic, morphological, semantic, and lexical. Findings reveal that Eliot’s alternation between rhyme and free verse, use of syntactic parallelism and deviation, and morphological manipulation through affixation and repetition together construct a “grammar of hesitation” reflective of Prufrock’s indecision and alienation. The repetition of time and other temporal markers semantically enacts existential paralysis, while the dominance of concrete nouns and cohesive devices highlights the density and inertia of modern experience. The study concludes that Eliot transforms linguistic form into a vehicle of psychological revelation, where rhythm, syntax, and diction embody the crisis of expression central to modernist consciousness.
Keywords
Stylistics ; Modernist Anxiety ; Linguistic Organisation ; T. S. Eliot ; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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