The forerunners. St. John the Baptist and Lazarus in the poetry of T. S. Eliot

In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Eliot invokes the figures of John the Baptist and Lazarus as portent signs of his doubt-ridden age. The “voice of one crying in the wilderness”, juxtaposed with the silence of Jesus’s best friend whom He had risen from the dead, points to the insufficiency of poetic language which fails to endow words with meaning. Eliot’s poetic personae inhabit the Augustinian “region of unlikeness”, where they live separated from the source of meaning and incapable of grasping the original imprint of divine Logos. They are exiles, wanderers and strangers, who cannot communicate with each other or relate to the world which surrounds them. Following in the footsteps of St. Augustine footsteps, Eliot envisions language as another “region of unlikeness” which we traverse after the Fall. The use of multiple masks and ironic equivocations in “Prufrock” illustrates this modern predicament.