“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: In the first line—“Let us go then, you and I”—the “you and I” may refer to Prufrock’s alternate personalities.

“Eliot offered different identifications. At some time in the 1950s, he answered the enquirer that ‘anything I say now must be somewhat conjectural, as it was written so long ago that my memory may deceive me; but I am prepared to assert that ‘you’ in The Love Song is merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex, whom the speaker is at the moment addressing…’ On the other hand, in a 1962 interview, Eliot said that Prufrock was in part a man of about forty and in part himself, and that he was employing the notion of the split personality…

“But the immediate source for ‘you and I’ is likely to have been Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), published in translation in 1910…In the Essai, Bergson develops the idea of a double self: one aspect being the everyday self, experiencing common reality; the other, a deeper self, attuned to profound truths, and normally in subjugation to the superficial self” (1, pp. 48-49).

“Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from multiple personalities of sorts…” (2). Laurence Perrine writes "The 'you and I' of the first line are divided parts of Prufrock's own nature” (2).

Comment

Why did Eliot, speaking about the poem in a 1950s interview, have to conjecture and presume what he had meant? Why didn’t he know for certain who “you” is in his poem? And why did he give a different explanation in the 1962 interview? Perhaps different personalities were answering the question in the two interviews.

1. B. C. Southam. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th ed. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1996.

2. Wikipedia. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock