By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Gerontion’ is notable for being the only English poem in T. S. Eliot’s second volume of poetry (the collection also contained some French poems) which does not adopt the regular quatrain form found in ‘A Cooking Egg’, ‘Sweeney Erect’, ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, and ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’. (There was another non-quatrain English poem, about a honeymoon night gone terribly wrong and titled simply ‘Ode’, in the original printing of the volume but Eliot was not happy with it and removed it from later editions.)