"Gerontion" is a poem by T. S. Eliot that was first published in 1920 in Ara Vus Prec (his volume of collected poems published in London) and Poems (an almost identical collection published simultaneously in New York). The title is Greek for "little old man," and the poem is a dramatic 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. Two years after it was published, Eliot considered including the poem as a preface to The Waste Land, but was talked out of thi
"Gerontion" is a poem by T. S. Eliot that was first published in 1920 in Ara Vus Prec (his volume of collected poems published in London) and Poems (an almost identical collection published simultaneously in New York). The title is Greek for "little old man," and the poem is a dramatic 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. 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. 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.
==History== "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.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).