Prufrock Howls: A Look at Inverted Story Arcs in Poetry

Most fiction writers and dramatists are familiar with the classic story arc: an inciting moment, rising action, climax, and resolution. Poems, while not always plot driven, contain story arcs as well. Here we will look at two examples of atypical story arcs: poems with falling action, and narrative momentum that is cyclical—in what I am dubbing an “inverted story arc”—and learn how you, too, can employ such a technique.

T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg

Even though “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was the first poem T.S. Eliot published, and “Howl” was the first for Allen Ginsberg, each poem had a major impact on poetry written in English and helped propel each writer’s career. Through their ambitious, meandering-but-high-concept poems, both Eliot and Ginsberg were able to redirect the course that literature was taking. Through their work as poets and intellectuals, Eliot, as principle member of the modernist poetry movement, and Ginsberg, one of the most influential players of the Beats school of poetry, shaped twentieth-century poetry. The topics explored in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” such as feelings of inadequacy, and grappling to find a place and acceptance in a world one feels overwhelmed by, are also themes explored by Ginsberg. Furthermore, the tools Eliot uses, including allusions and repetitive descending story arcs—a device we’ll look at in depth here—can be observed in “Howl”, which was published forty years later.

Inverted Story Arc in “Prufrock”

Written in the form of a dramatic monologue, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reflects the unease of Eliot, a young American writing in England in 1915 at the beginning of the devastating disruption of the First World War. As titular character and narrator, Prufrock timidly questions his fortitude to take a risk. Even when a “decision” is made, in Prufrock’s mind, it will soon be undone. His world is not settled. He is living with uncertainty, mistrusting every move. Prufrock is crippled by overthinking, paralyzed under the weight of his own reflections, and the pace of the poem reflects that.

A revolutionary technique Eliot uses in “Prufrock” is an inverted story arc. Rather than using a conventional story arc where the model for a narrative is conflict, complications, and a rise in action that leads towards a resolution, Eliot takes a different tack. Repeatedly throughout the poem, Eliot decreases the poem’s action and essentially neglects a resolution. He then ramps back up with an inciting moment, followed by a fall—not rise—in action once again. The result is smaller story arcs within the longer arc of the poem as a whole. To achieve this effect in the poem, Eliot uses repetition and interrogative sentences to avoid resolving to the most recent conflict.

To see this inverted story arc, we can look at three stanzas in the middle of the poem where Eliot uses this established pattern.

As an inciting moment, Eliot writes the confident statement, “For I have known them all already, known them all,” implying wisdom and experience associated with a mature individual. The confidence is fleeting as the momentum quickly slows underneath the bleak tediousness of the lines that follow: “Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” The action has become monotonous, strained, and trivial. The stanza ends with Prufrock uncertain, tentative, asking the question, “So how should I presume?” without giving the stanza a resolution. In addition to the absence of closure, ending the stanza on this moment of doubt further solidifies Prufrock as an indecisive character.

Eliot slightly alters the inciting moment for the next arc in the following stanza, writing, “And I have known the eyes already, known them all—” moving the overall poem forward without sacrificing the repetition effect of miniature story arcs. Unlike the first line from the previous stanza where “all” was an unspecified and ambiguous concept of time, in the proceeding stanza the “eyes” have become personal, human, and more sinister. This serves to increase the tension, but only briefly, as Prufrock confronts disembodied eyes, and expresses anxieties over what to do “when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall.” He soon, again, yields, “And how should I presume?” Without the conviction to presume, the stanza essentially evaporates into an ending without an answer to the question. No resolution.

Finally, the third stanza cycles through the process for the last time, “And I have known the arms already.” The “arms” may be disembodied like the eyes, by they are “braceleted,” attractive, feminized, and therefore less threatening to Prufrock. Eliot even seems be describing a specific set of arms, which shows how the poem’s larger narrative arc has progressed when compared to the generalized “all” from the earlier stanza. The poem then interrupts itself with a self-aware aside, “(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress?” This takes the reader out of the present moment, stopping any rising action. When the stanza concludes with, “And should I then presume? / And how should I begin?” Prufrock is as confused as ever. This open-ended question is met with a section break and more questions (“Shall I say…”). Despite giving a series of unsatisfying non-resolutions and constantly slowing down the action, Eliot progresses the overall poem using this unlikely method of a decrescendo arc.

Inverted Story Arc in “Howl”

While traditional, anglophile Eliot and hippie Ginsberg were politically divergent, they shared a few commonalities. Both were highly educated at prestigious universities, Eliot at Harvard and Ginsberg at Columbia. Eliot scholar Louis Menand notes that “At the height of his creative and critical output, he had a nervous breakdown and diagnosed his condition as aboulie—lack of will.” Ginsberg was no stranger to mental health struggles himself and the theme of “madness” plays an important role in “Howl.” After being hospitalized for mental health concerns, Ginsberg met Carl Solomon, for whom the poem is dedicated to. Indeed, a fictionalized version of the hospital where Solomon was being treated, Rockland, provides the setting for the third section of the poem.

It is possible to draw a connection between Ginsberg and Eliot, particularly when examining “Howl” alongside “Prufrock” and exploring how these two poems maintain their narrative momentum over the course of such long spans. If, as Yale professor Langdon Hammer asserts, Eliot captured “consciousness, the way our minds work…we think and feel through language,” Ginsberg attempted to capture stream-of-consciousness in his writing. However, this stream-of-consciousness does not occur in Ginsberg without mindful editing. The unexpected word choices and fresh imagery reveals the meticulous efforts that crafting such a densely worded poem entails.

Like “Prufrock,” Ginsberg’s “Howl” is a meditative poem, a surreal monologue that captures the sensation of meandering, or trekking, through the writer’s consciousness. Written in three distinct parts followed by “footnotes,” it begins at such a rapid pace that the reader can lose his or her place, unable to follow his logic, because of the barrage of images and unexplained references. One barely has enough time to comprehend an image before another one appears. Due to the poem’s incredibly long lines and unexpected syntax, the first section of the poem has a breathless, urgent quality. The result is that the long lines, like in “Prufrock,” creates an inverted arc of action, where the tension dwindles to a point without closure, until the inciting action of the next line begins the process over again. The first line of “Howl” reads:

This incendiary, energetic opening line contains too many intense images to maintain the heightened vitality it begins with, and because of this over-saturation of words—and literal breathlessness if read out loud—a falling action is inevitable in the story arc. The narrative action is revived when the second line begins and the reader is reminded that the subject of this one, incredibly long sentence is “the best minds.” This helps to locate the reader grammatically and logically in the poem before the next breathless line packed with complex syntax. This effect is much like the device Eliot uses in “Prufrock.” The poem progresses as small, descending arcs of action play out in each of the long lines.

Ginsberg also plays with story arcs by using repetition to drive the poem forward, and by juxtaposing emotions to create a moderating effect on the usual rise in action. He repetitively, aggressively evokes the god Moloch, who in addition to having ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Biblical origins also appears in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In Ginsberg’s hands, this demon serves as the receptacle of the anger in the poem, “Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!” The first section was one long sentence but in the second, there are dozens, all exclamations, except for the first question, all to stress this wrath. The poem’s lamentations are numerous. While the vast complaints are against industrialization, Ginsberg rails against everything from capitalism—“Moloch whose blood is running money!”—to war—“Boys sobbing in armies!”—to the government—“Congress of sorrows!”—to personal isolation—“Moloch in whom I sit lonely!” Because Ginsberg decrying Moloch interrupts nearly every sentence and line in the second section, the reader can almost miss the vivid, delicately arranged images Ginsberg crafts. He writes, “Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!” With these sensory details, the industrialized landscape is depicted for the reader in unexpected and original ways. Yet, the setting is not that far removed from “the soot that falls from chimneys” in “Prufrock, or “the smoke that rises from the pipes / Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.” Both poems describe bleak cityscapes in a modernist rejection, not optimistic about human nature. It is this emotional oscillation between rage, a propelling force, and dejection, which slows narrative momentum, that creates the fall in action rather than the rise typical of a story arc.

In the third section of “Howl,” a radical shift occurs as the narration takes on an empathic position, and with this tonal shift the arc of the poem begins anew. The reader is reminded that this poem is indeed written “For Carl Solomon.” Instead of the unsettling, manic, “Moloch! Moloch!” refrain looming heavily over the words in a monstrous stance, there is the reassuring, “I am with you in Rockland” repeated before each line. Whatever mental illness is occurring in Solomon’s world, Ginsberg, the writer and the narrator of the poem, is alongside him simultaneously suffering, feeling his pain but lending his unwavering support. The lines in the third section range from the simple, “I’m with you in Rockland / where you laugh at this invisible humor” to the much longer, “I’m with you in Rockland / where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.” However, no matter the line length or the vividness of the image, both show the humanity of those individuals suffering from mental illness and advocate for their humane treatment. “Howl” ends on a Prufrock-like image, “in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.” It is as if the sea-girls have left the waves and decided to sing to this subject, to traverse “through certain half-deserted streets” across a disappointing, industrialized landscape.

While Eliot and Ginsberg were politically opposed in their views and writing nearly a half-century apart, both were reacting to the social and global events occurring at the time they were writing. Their work, particularly their debut pieces, share several of the same features, most notably allusions, but also unexpected narrative arcs. Due to their innovative poems, their contributions radically altered the course of their peers’ artistic trajectories.

How to Use an Inverted Story Arc

If you are interested in employing a similar technique as Eliot or Ginsberg, here are a few tips to craft your own inverted story arcs:

• Consider using an inverted story arc if you are writing a longer poem. Let your narrative momentum fall, knowing you can always speed back up (or vice versa) in the next line, stanza, or section.
• Use first person narration or a singular character delivering a dramatic monologue. With one character at the helm steering the poem, it will be easier to manipulate the pace of the plot.
• Use repetition, cycling through the same topics to give the feeling of not progressing in action.
• Employ emotional mood swings, using images and language of rage next to resigned, hope, followed by remorse, so character growth through a narrative arc is uncertain.