>Which avant-garde features are to be found in Prufrock that are not to be >found in the version of The Waste Land that Eliot showed Pound? >Tim Romano Good question, because I can't really follow Perloff's argument. She believes that the avant-garde Eliot is found in the early poems collected in the Inventions of a March Hare and Prufrock. She analyzes Pruforck's shifting points of view, dislocated syntax and urban setting and relates it to "Constructivist notions of 'laying bare the device,' of using material form--in this case, language--as an active compositional agent, impelling the reader to participate in the process of the construction." Gerontion and The Waste Land represent a turn away from this avant-garde orientation. The Waste Land is "the brilliant culmination of the poetic revolution" that began with Prufrock and not itself a revolutionary break though. She argues that the Eliot of Prufrock is the first poet in English who understood "Flaubert's radical doctrine of the mot juste and the Mallarmean precept that poetry is 'language charged with meaning'--a language as intense and multi-vocal as possible . . . ." In The Waste Land, the "appeal, however oblique to an outside source of authority makes for more authorial control . . . than the fragmentation, parataxis, and collage structure of The Waste Land would suggest . . . " The "interchangeable pronouns" of Prufrock (Let us go then, you and I) are gone; and so it is not a "'dialogic' poem in the / Bakhtinian sense."