Search for the Impersonal ‘We’ in “Gerontion”: A Link toward The Waste Land

Abstract

“Gerontion” chronologically is the last poem in Poems, but Eliot placed it in the beginning of the volume. With the dramatic monologue as its form, the poem reminds of the earlier dramatic monologues in the Prufrock volume, but is bounded with satirical poems. Viewed from a century’s distance, dramatic monologue dominates the three major phases of Eliot’s early years: Prufrock (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922). While The Waste Land is definitely the most comprehensive and cumulative, “Gerontion,” originally meant to be a prelude to the longer poem, serves as an important link, binding the first two and predicting the third in form and technique. More importantly, “Gerontion” also links the phases in terms of subject matter. Since Eliot’s major reason for the technical shift in the quatrain poems is the more personal nature of his poetic subject toward the end of 1910s, his prime struggle was to find an impersonal ‘we’—the most comprehensive voice and point of view that both involves and transcends his own and others’ personal points of view and voices—with the help of impersonal techniques. “Gerontion,” as the result of this struggle, is a fusion of Prufrock and Poems both in technique and subject matter, restoring the dramatic monologue and developing the transformed I-You relation in the more comprehensive ‘we,’ though the poet is yet to explore its comprehensiveness further in The Waste Land.