Let us go then, you and I,

from T.S. Eliot – The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock on Rap Genius

The first two lines of the poem are lyrical and set a romantic (or Romantic) atmosphere. The third line, “Like a patient…” marks a distinct break with romance — as did Eliot’s Modernistic style.

The “you and I” has been variously interpreted as Prufrock and a companion, Prufrock and the reader, or as Prufrock and the side of Prufrock’s psyche with which he’s engaged in an endless debate.

Eliot himself is on the record on the matter of who the speaker is/ might be talking to. In a New York Times article on Eliot’s letters, Denis Donoghue reports:

Eliot told Kristian Smidt that the “you” is “merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex, whom the speaker is at that moment addressing, and that it has no emotional content whatever.” But in an interview in 1962 he said that Prufrock was a man of about forty and in part himself and that he was using the theory of the split personality.

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