Gerontion - Critical Response

Critical Response

Eliot scholar Grover Smith says 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." Bernard Bergonzi claims that "Eliot's most considerable poem of the period between 1915 and 1919 is 'Gerontion'". Kirk believes that "To me, the blank verse of 'Gerontion' is Eliot's most moving poetry, but he never tried this virile mode later."

The literary critic Anthony Julius, who has analysed the presence of anti-Semitic rhetoric in Eliot's work, 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 / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp."