When lovely woman stoops to folly and
     Paces about her room again, alone,
     She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, 
     And puts a record on the gramophone.

Read as a Chaplin-like comedy, Eliot’s Prufrock makes ready 
sense. Prufrock is the complete Pierrot, the little puppet of the 
mechanical civilization that was about to do a flip into its 
electric phase.

     It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of 
complex mechanical forms such as film and phonograph as the 
prelude to the automation of human song and dance. As this 
automation of human voice and gesture had approached 
perfection, so the human work force approached automation. 
Now in the electric age the assembly line with its human hands