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Gerontion

"Gerontion" is a poem by T. S. Eliot that was first published in 1920 in Ara Vos Prec (his volume of collected poems published in London) and Poems (an almost identical collection published simultaneously in New York).[1] The title is Greek for "little old man," and the poem is an interior monologue relating the opinions and impressions of an elderly man, which describes Europe after World War I through the eyes of a man who has lived most of his life in the 19th century.[2] Two years after it was published, Eliot considered including the poem as a preface to The Waste Land, but was talked out of this by Ezra Pound.[3] Along with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land, and other works published by Eliot in the early part of his career, '"Gerontion" discusses themes of religion, sexuality, and other general topics of modernist poetry.[4]

For the Homeland episode, see Gerontion (Homeland).

History[edit]

"Gerontion" is one of the handful of poems that Eliot composed between the end of World War I in 1918 and his work on The Waste Land in 1921. During that time, Eliot was working at Lloyds Bank and editing The Egoist, devoting most of his literary energy to writing review articles for periodicals. When he published the two collections in February, 1920 Ara Vos Prec, "Gerontion" was almost the only poem he had never offered to the public before and was placed first in both volumes.[5]


Two earlier versions of the poem can be found, the original typescript of the poem as well as that version with comments by Ezra Pound. In the typescript, the name of the poem is "Gerousia", referring to the name of the Council of the Elders at Sparta.[6] Pound, who was living in London in 1919, was helping Eliot revise the poem (encouraging him to delete roughly one third of the text). When Eliot proposed publishing Gerontion as the opening part of The Waste Land, Pound discouraged him: "I do not advise printing Gerontion as preface. One don't miss it at all as the thing now stands. To be more lucid still, let me say that I advise you NOT to print Gerontion as prelude."[3] The lines were never added to the text and remained an individual poem.[6]

Other prominent lines[edit]

The phrase "wilderness of mirrors" from the poem has been alluded to by many other writers and artists. It has been used as the titles of plays by Van Badham and Charles Evered, of novels by Max Frisch, and of albums by bands such as Waysted. Rock singer Fish entitled his first solo album Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors.


Some commentators believe that James Jesus Angleton took the phrase from this poem when he described the confusion and strange loops of espionage and counter-intelligence, such as the Double-Cross System, as a "wilderness of mirrors".[25][26] It thence entered and has since become commonplace in the vocabulary of writers of spy novels or of popular historical writing about espionage. It was the title of an episode of the television series JAG where the protagonist is subjected to disinformation.[27]


Another prominent line in the poem, "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas/To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk", is the origin of the title of Katherine Anne Porter's first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930).

Sources[edit]

There is a connection between Gerontion and Eliot's understanding of F. H. Bradley's views. In Eliot's doctoral dissertation, later published as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, Eliot explores Bradley's philosophy to determine how the mind relates to reality. By relying on Bradley, Eliot is able to formulate his own scepticism and states: "Everything, from one point of view, is subjective; and everything, from another point of view is objective; and there is no absolute point of view from which a decision may be pronounced."[28] In terms of poetic structure, Eliot was influenced by Jacobean dramatists such as Thomas Middleton that relied on blank verse in their dramatic monologues. Lines within the poems are connected to the works of a wide range of writers, including A. C. Benson, Lancelot Andrewes, and Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams.[29]

Critical response[edit]

Eliot scholar Grover Smith said of this poem, "If any notion remained that in the poems of 1919 Eliot was sentimentally contrasting a resplendent past with a dismal present, Gerontion should have helped to dispel it."[30] Bernard Bergonzi writes that "Eliot's most considerable poem of the period between 1915 and 1919 is 'Gerontion'".[31] Kirk believes that "To me, the blank verse of 'Gerontion' is Eliot's most moving poetry, but he never tried this virile mode later."[15]


The literary critic Anthony Julius, who has analysed the presence of anti-Semitic rhetoric in Eliot's work,[32][33] has cited "Gerontion" as an example of a poem by Eliot that contains anti-Semitic sentiments. In the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, the poem contains the line, "And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building] / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp."[34]

Bergonzi, Bernard. T. S. Eliot. New York: Macmillan Company, 1972.

Childs, Donald J. and Eliot, T.S. Mystic, Son, and Lover. Continuum International Publishing Group (1997)

Kirk, Russell. Eliot and His Age. Wilmington: ISA Books, 2008.

David C. Martin (1 July 2003). Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents. The Lyons Press.  1-58574-824-2.

ISBN

Montgomery, Marion. T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the American Magus. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1970.

Works related to Gerontion at Wikisource

at Standard Ebooks

An omnibus collection of T. S. Eliot's poetry

public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Gerontion