Eliot: an American use of symbolism

Abstract

Hugh kenner says of ‘Gerontion’: ‘It need not be done twice and Eliot does not do it again.’ True, he never exploited to the same degree what Kenner, quoting Empson, calls ‘the echoes and recesses of words’.¹ Yet ‘Gerontion’ must be seen as central to Eliot’s poetic practice; here he initiates and exhaustively explores permanent features of his basic idiom. Here also he enacts the logic — the social as well as verbal logic — of the conversion of words into the Word. Thereafter, the Word within the word is immanent as doctrinal justification for each poetic act. ‘Gerontion’ may well end in Eliot, as Kenner claims, one whole phase of Anglo-American linguistic practice; but emphatically it inaugurates that marriage of doctrine and poetic which determines our final sense of Eliot’s career.