Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

“Gerontion,” written in the summer of 1919 and originally intended as the

prelude to The Waste Land,^1 was ¤rst published in T. S. Eliot’s 1920 volume

Ara Vos Prec (London: Ovid Press).^2 It did not have a good press. The anony-

mous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement complained that the poet’s

world-weariness was no more than a “habit, an anti-romantic reaction, a

new Byronism,” while Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman describes

“Geront ion” as follows:

The whole poem is a description at once of an old man’s mind, and of

a mood which recurs often in Mr. Eliot’s poems, namely, that of one

to whom life is largely a process of being sti®ed, slowly hemmed in and

confused.... His problem as a poet is the problem of the adjustment

of his sense of beauty to these sorry facts.^3

MacCarthy goes on to say that the symbolism of the ¤rst verse of “Geron-

tion” is “obvious”: “When the old man says he has not fought in the salt

marshes, etc., we know that means that he has not tasted the violent romance

In 2002 Professor Shyamal Bagchee invited me to give the annual T. S. Eliot
Memorial Lecture for the Eliot Society, which meets annually in St. Louis, the
place of the poet’s birth. For the occasion, I thought it would be valuable to
reconsider one of Eliot’s most well-known but still highly controversial poems.

2

Cunning Passages and Contrived Corridors

Rereading Eliot’s “Gerontion”

Ce que dit la poésie ne peut être dit autrement.

Jacques Roubaud, “Poésie et Pensée: quelques remarques”