Gerontion (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: T. S. Eliot
- First Published: 1920
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: Religion, Human race, Spiritual life or spirituality, Jews or Jewish life, Human behavior, Jesus Christ, Old age or elderly people, Aging
Like Eliot's earlier “Portraits of a Lady” (1917) and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the poem “Gerontion” is a dramatic but interior monologue in which the voice of the narrator is distinctly realized, and his words reveal his character and the dramatic situation or scene in which he acts. A difficult poem, it may be approached as a collage, entered as one would a stream, in this case the stream of consciousness of the narrator, who is, literally, a “little old man.”
The narrator weaves personal history with more universal themes to form a meditative...
[The entire page is 674 words long]
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