"The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Widle and "The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock" by T.S.Elliot

Aestheticism figures prominently in both The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; each work, however, has a specific paradigm: Dorian Gray has aestheticism as the subjective merit of beauty independent of its reality, whereas Prufrock has aestheticism as a sordid quality, all too present within modern culture. The drawing rooms of Prufrock are listless, full of desultory imagery; while in Dorian Gray they are alive: the idle bandying of public art and popular philosophy becomes vivid, a vehicle for wit.
The historical context of the works, the background which is referenced throughout, is the same; while separated by several decades, both works address cultures remarkably similar, cultures in which high society is indulgent to the exclusion of realism. …