Editing Gerontion (section)

==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 (historic)|Lloyds Bank]] and editing ''[[The Egoist (periodical)|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.<ref>Kirk 53</ref>

Two earlier versions of the poem can be found, the original typescript of the poem as well as that version with comments by [[Ezra Pound]]. In the typescript, the name of the poem is "[[Gerousia]]", referring to the name of the Council of the Elders at [[Sparta]].<ref name=Miller>Miller, James Edwin. ''T. S. Eliot''. Penn State Press (2005), p. 351</ref> Pound, who was living in London in 1919, was helping Eliot revise the poem (encouraging him to delete roughly one third of the text). When Eliot proposed publishing ''Gerontion'' as the opening part of ''The Waste Land'', Pound discouraged him:  "I do not advise printing Gerontion as preface. One don't miss it at all as the thing now stands. To be more lucid still, let me say that I advise you NOT to print Gerontion as prelude."<ref name=Eliot>T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound. ''The Waste Land: The Original Facsimile of the Original Drafts Including Annotations of Ezra Pound '' Ed. Valerie Eliot. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (1974) p. 127</ref> The lines were never added to the text and remained an individual poem.<ref name="Miller"/>