love and death

In Eliot's familiar modernist voice, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" delivers a depiction of the mentality of the modernist man. Yeats' "The Second Coming" is also a poem about the mentality of the same time period. Both poems comment on the hopelessness and anxieties of the age but do so in wildly different ways. For instance Prufrock will use Fragmentation to illustrate anxieties but in Second Coming there is much, much more use of diction, syntax, and allusions and almost no fragmentation.