Postures of Dying: Eliot, Seneca and the Elizabethans

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses the substantial intertextual relations between Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’, Seneca’s tragedies, and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, particularly in the depictions of dying speeches. It demonstrates, too, that ‘Gerontion’ is a prominent example of how Eliot’s poetry anticipates the issues explored in his critical prose—in this case, notably ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ and ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’. Further, the article relates the use of what Eliot called ‘saturated’ images in early modern drama and his own poetry with his theories of poetic creation and originality. In so doing, it argues that, contrary to the accepted critical narrative, the famous description of a ‘profound kinship’ with an unnamed ‘dead author’ that Eliot describes in ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, may not primarily and exclusively refer to Jules Laforgue.