OTHER INFERNAL ECHOES: PRUFROCK AND THE DISGRUNTLED GHOST OF JOSEPH CONRAD

Perdition can indeed be a captivating topic. Of late, it has become fashionable to detect certain "infernal" echoes in modern poetry from the outset of Romanticism with "Kubla Khan",(l) to Stevens' favourite lyric "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" (2) even most recently to Frost's best known work, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." (3) By "infernal", I refer to a supposed debt to Dante's Inferno. Perhaps because of the lure of such hints of hellfire and brimstone, modern critics are becoming increasingly susceptible to the temptation of over ingenious reading. For example, the critic finding Satanic imagery at the tail end of "Kubla Khan" uses a surprising act of verbal wizardry: he interprets the line "And all who heard should see them there" as alluding to demons not to "those caves of ice," the contextual referent. (4)