Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Under the Rubric of Dhvani Principle

Abstract

T. S. Eliot is often regarded as the greatest and most intelligent poet of the twentieth century. He employs linguistic techniques such as irony, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, and many sorts of imagery to portray modern man’s damaged mind. One of them is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The puzzled and wicked metropolitan life of modern humans is depicted in this poem. These aesthetic aspects imply a different meaning because they do not provide direct meaning or denotations. As a result, in light of Anandavardhana’s idea of Dhvani, his poetry is shown to be compatible with the interpretation of suggested meanings. The Dhavni principle is the most strong and important of the several Indian aesthetic theories. To understand the suggested meaning or implied meaning, it is required to understand the diverse forms of words, their different meanings, and the process of getting the suggested meanings, which is the basis of this theory. The power of words refers to the process of obtaining implied meaning. The primary goal of the power of the word is to comprehend the various forms of meaning. The power of word is divided into three categories: Expressive, Indicative, and Suggestive, on which the entire Dhavni philosophy is built.