Eliot,” New Statesman 8 (January 1921); rpt. in T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, 111–17,
115.
- The text used for “Gerontion” is Eliot’s Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1970), 29–31. - Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot (New York: Collier, 1972), 55.
- Stephen Spender, Eliot (London: Fontana, 1975), 66–67.
7. In all editions prior to the 1962 Collected Poems, the word “Jew” was not capi-
talized. - See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern
American Poetry, 1908–1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 144. - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1930–1932; From the
Notes of John King and Desmond Lee, ed. Desmond Lee (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1980), 112. - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), #19. - For Eliot’s sources and allusions in “Gerontion,” see B. C. Southam, A Guide
to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968), 43–47.
Most Eliot commentaries like Grover Smith’s T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study
in Sources and Meaning, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), ex-
plain these references. The most recent step-by-step explication of the poem is Denis
Donoghue’s in Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2000), 77–95. - Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1959), 125. - Scansion is as follows: primary stress (/), secondary stress (/), plus junc-
ture or short grammatical pause (|), caesura (||), enjambment (>). Alliterative and
assonantal letters are italicized. - Julius relates Gerontion’s “Here I am” to Abraham’s “Behold, here I am,” spo-
ken in response to God’s call in Genesis. But whereas Abraham’s words ¤x his iden-
tity, Gerontion’s never do (63). - See, for example, Southam, Guide to the Selected Poems, 45–47.
- See Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 1999), 137.
- Leyris’s translation may be found, next to some passages translated by Jean
Wahl, in a very useful essay by Joan Fillmore Hooker called “Visions and Revisions:
‘Gerontion’ in French,” in Laura Cowan, ed., T. S. Eliot: Man and Poet, vol. 1 (Orono:
National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, 1990), 125–48; see Appendix, 146–48. - Jewel Spears Brooker, “Eliot in the Dock: A Review Essay,” South Atlantic Re-
view 62, no. 4 (fall 1996): 107–14, 112. - Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), 29. Hugh Kenner (129) similarly notes that “the Jew who was spawned
in some estaminet of Antwerp cannot but prolong into the present the reputation of
another who was born in a different inn,” and Brooker notes that the etymolog y of
estaminet (little café) is barn or cowhouse (310), so that the reference is indeed to
Christ in the Bethlehem manger.
Notes to Pages 21–29 273