Explore how time and place have an impact on Eliot’s poetry.

T.S. Eliot shows how alienated and unhappy Prufrock is through revealing his thoughts about his time and place. Most of the images Prufrock associates with the time and place he inhabits are grim and negative.
For example, he describes London's evening sky as:

Like a patient etherized upon a table

He continues to picture London in negative terms: it is a place of "cheap hotels" and its streets are like a "tedious argument."
Once at his party, Prufrock continues his negative self-talk or stream-of-consciousness thinking. Time is as tedious to him as place. Everything seems to repeat in a hopeless way and never to arrive anywhere. He thinks about how tired he is of it all:

For I have known them already, known them all: / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Prufrock tries to tell himself that he still has time to achieve something significant with his life, but by the end of the poem he is admitting:

I grow old [...] I grow old.

Prufrock wants to escape his time and place, both of which are dreary and deadening to him. Two images of release pop into his mind. First, he wishes he could live under the ocean, away from London society:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

The above image represents a desire for a more primal life, the animal's unthinking existence of living by instinct, which would relieve Prufrock of the burden of his endless thoughts.
At the end of the poem, Prufrock has a more romantic image of escape. Here we would like to replace modern London with a fantasy land of Greek mythology, which seems far more enchanting than his mundane life. However, he also realizes that this world of the imagination is not for him, because he says:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.

This poem shows the alienation and unhappiness of the generation dealing with life in the early twentieth-century. Victorian optimism has faded, leaving disillusion in its place.