The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a dramatic monologue. It presents a speaking voice (to his own conscience) and consists in a juxtaposition of scenes, since it follows no pattern: scenes are kept together by a refrain (like a song). This displays a revolutionary aspect: free verse. The technical device “dramatis personae” is used to convey the effect of drama (theatre-like scenes). Usually, the reader is helped by the structure, but he is lost here. The only guide is intertextual reference, like Dante’s quotation. The impression is of listening to something intimate, showing a communion between reader and poet. There is a difficulty in communication: the character is not able even to talk to a person of his age or to reveal his feelings. The images build a connotative level and are precise, making the reader feel what conscience feels. The character, unable to do something, is an antihero: heroes are godlike humans, but there are no gods in modernist times.

Dramatic monologue have been adopted since the Victorian Age, by Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. Another character is adopted, with the dramatis personae device. The aim is to take distance from emotional involvement: the monologue is an outburst with universal value rather than a confession. In the past, Shakespeare’s soliloquies showed the characters suffering and wondering about the sense of life, revealing a dark side they could not know entirely, since light (symbol of rationality) was not.

T. S. Eliot also stated what makes a product of art innovative: if it displays all the traditions in its bones and it changes also all what was in that art before.