Knowledge and Experience: Analysis of F. H. Bradley’s Philosophy in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

This study reinterprets T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as a philosophical poem through F. H. Bradley’s theory of knowledge and metaphysics. By way of exploring both “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, the paper employs Bradleyan categories—knowledge and experience, immediate experience, finite center, reality and idea, and the Absolute—to demonstrate that the poem’s difficulty is not merely the result of Symbolist techniques but an aesthetic embodiment of an epistemological structure. Bradley argues that what we experience as contradictory belongs to the realm of appearance, while the Absolute is a single reality in which such contradictions are resolved. Through the imperfect figure of Prufrock as a speaker situated in the phenomenal world, Eliot poetically enacts the speaker’s and poet’s striving toward Bradley’s notion of the complete real.