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Endnotes: Ezra “Pound’s struggle on behalf of Eliot’s poetry” and Eliot’s own praise of Pound, including his famous dedication of The Waste Land (“il miglior fabbro”) are in Noel Stock’s The Life of Ezra Pound (Pantheon Books, 1970). When Eliot sought Pound’s advice whether to print “Gerontion” as a “prelude” to “The Waste Land” or in “pamphlet form,” the older poet replied in his fractured style: “I do not advise printing Gerontion as preface. One don’t miss at all of the thing now stands....” (italics in original) (The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. by Valerie Eliot, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1971)The quotes from the late Professor Bornstein are taken from his essay, “T.S. Eliot and the Real World” (1997). Speculation regarding “Mrs Cammel” and other figures in “Gerontion” may be found in “Eliot’s ‘Gerontion,’ “ The Explicator , Vol. 7, No 4 (1949). Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) was a cult figure among New York intellectuals. In his essay, “T.S. Eliot as the International Hero,” Schwartz took the “old man” in “Gerontion” to “refer to human beings of many nationalities to Mr Silvero at Limoges, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fraulen von Klup and Christ [the tiger]... .” Schwartz also concluded that the tourist in “Burbank” had an unsuccessful romantic attachment to Princess Volupine–an interpretation shared by other critics. Schwartz’s essay is reprinted in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker (University of Chicago Press, 1970). T.S. Matthews, whose informal biography, Great Tom (Harper & Row, 1973) covers Eliot’s St. Louis roots describes “‘Gerontion’ as a monologue...in the guise of a little old man....” Eliot enjoyed toying with those who were curious about his real life models. In a letter, the poet told Emily Hale that “Mr. Silvero” in “Gerontion” was based upon a curator, Matthew Prichard, but the name may be a reference to Henry Adams who supported “the Silver Standard,” as he wrote in The Education over gold which was favored by Boston bankers. Prichard had worked at the Museum of Fine Arts and knew Isabella Stewart Gardner; he and Eliot lived in the sam pension in Paris. In his novel, Put Out More Flags , Evelyn Waugh wrote of Lloyd George’s government: “The worst time had been after the Armistice when peerages were sold like groceries.” (Dell ed., 1961) Robert Gorham Davis set forth the literary origin of the New Criticism and Eliot’s influence in his 1949 essay, “The New Criticism and the Democratic Tradition.” The essay is reprinted in The American Scholar Reader, ed. by Hiram Haydn and Betsy Saunders (Atheneum, 1960). Edmund Wilson’s New Yorker essay “Miss Buttle” and “Mr. Eliot” was reprinted in The Bit Between My Teeth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965). Wilson (1895-1972) wrote book reviews for The New Republic and The New Yorker where his conventional views, set in polished prose, won him many admirers. Bernard Bergonzi (1929-2016) was a professor at the University of Warwick. “Although I do not wish to minimize the difficulties of “The Waste Land,” he wrote in his study of T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion” is certainly much more obscure.” Nevertheless, in his close reading of the text, Bergonzi perceived that one of the poem’s themes was unrequited love: “...the old man vainly trying to find meaning in past experiences is tormented by some elusive if erotic failure.” ( T.S. Eliot, The Macmillan Company, 2nd ed. 1978) Eliot scholars continue to search for the origin of words and phrases in “Gerontion.” In Young Eliot: From St. Louis to the Waste Land, Robert Crawford, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, traces the poem’s reference to “in the windy straits/Of Belle Isle” to Eliot’s sailing off Cape Ann during his family’s summer holidays in Massachusetts. Like many modern Eliot scholars, Crawford draws on the four volumes of Eliot’s letters (covering 1898 to 1929), co-edited by Valerie Eliot. Eliot wanted no biography written of him but gave Valerie permission to edit his letters. She died in 2012. According to Professor Crawford, in later years Eliot denied that he was antisemitic and spoke out against Nazi persecution of Jews. However, his parents seem to have harbored prejudices that were typical among upper-class Americans in the nineteenth century. In 1920, Eliot’s mother confessed to him: “It is very bad in me, but I have an instinctive antipathy toward Jews...Of course there are Jews and Jews, and I must be not so much narrow-minded, as narrow in my sympathies... Father never liked to have business dealings with them...” (Professor Crawford’s biography also mentions Matthew Prichard’s residence in the Pension Casaubon with Eliot.) Mike Gold (1894-1967) was a pugnacious critic who championed the “proletarian” view in literature. In one of his many swipes at T.S. Eliot, Gold wrote: “If the...snobbism of T.S. Eliot and the beer-garden aristocracy of H.L. Mencken had their origin in the boom decade of capitalism, the democratic renaissance of the Thirties was born out of the great depression...Alike did the disciples of Mencken and Eliot find themselves going through the bankruptcy wringer, jumping out of penthouse windows and hunting for jobs with the rest of the American people. Being sophisticated, snobbish or skeptical was no more help now than it would have been on a shipwreck.” (“The Second American Renaissance,” collected in Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. by Michael Folsom, International Publishers, 1971) The Lionel Trilling-Clement Greenberg exchange is referenced in Professor Trilling’s letter to Commentary in July 1961 which is reprinted in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, ed. by Adam Kirsch, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). Trilling was an influential teacher and writer but seldom explored the off-ramps of literature. “Henry Adams,” the 1952 essay in which Trilling balanced the historian’s virtues and shortcomings is collected in A Gathering of Fugitives. (Beacon Press, 1956 ) In his 1948 study of the Progressive Era, The American Political Tradition, Professor Richard Hofstadater (1916-1970) noted “...there are fine insights in The Education of Henry Adams ” and Adams’s “novel of Washington, Democracy, ” but Hofstadater makes no mention of the historian’s antisemitism. The letter from Hofstadater to Alfred Kazin is quoted in David S. Brown’s biography, The Last American Aristocrat (Scribner, 2020). Ezra Pound’s own troubling history of antisemitism is well documented in Evan Kindley’s review of The Bughouse by Daniel Swift which appeared in The Nation, April 23, 2018. In spite of his views, Pound’s poetry and place as a father of Modernist Poetry have been widely recognized by many writers, including Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Zukofsky, and critic Hugh Kenner. Adams seems to have had only one prominent disciple, Gore Vidal (1925-2012) whose novel, Washington, D.C., reflects Adams’s influence; and though Adams has fallen from grace, there have been attempts to resurrect his reputation, e.g., a study of the historian’s seven volume history of the Jefferson-Madison era by Gary Wills, a libertarian scholar: Henry Adams and the Making of America (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005); and Andrew Delbanco’s essay, “Henry Adams and the End of the World,” reprinted in Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now ” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). The neo-conservatives appear split in their reappraisal of Henry Adams: In his New York Times column, Bret Stephens condemned the way Adams “sneeringly described the immigrants he saw in New York,” pointing out that “Within a generation those Yacobs and Ysaacs would be Goldmans, Frankfurters, Salks, Rickovers and Bellows.” (“Weaponizing America Against Itself,” NYT, May 18, 2022). On the other hand, Joseph Epstein referred to Henry Adams approvingly in a Wall Street Journal column, “When Character Mattered In D.C.,” in which he rued “...the end of WASP culture, beginning sometime in the 1960s.” (WSJ, July 13, 2013) In his sweeping study of 500 years of Western cultural life, Jacques Barzun (1907-2012), the distinguised Columbia University historian, who admired The Education, masked Adams's prejudices in explaining, "Adams saw increasing multiplicity and diversity in the loss of enegy" (that Adams believed drove history). (From Dawn to Decadence, HarperCollins, 2000) Alfred Kazin's reluctance to criticize Adam's antisemitism may have been an act of intellectual discipline that otherwise would water- down the views of a writer whose Education Kazin considered "high art," as well an attack on "the represive spirit of modern capitalism" ; and whose History had been written "in the proud spirit of the intellectual-like Tocqueville in his Recollections of the 1848 Revolution and Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution." ("Henry Adams," collected in An Amercan Procession, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) Biographies of Marian “Clover” Adams (1843-1885) include Natalie Dystra’s Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2012) and Otto Friedrich’s co-biography, Clover: The Tragic Love Story of Clover and Henry Adams and Their Brilliant Life in America’s Gilded Age (Simon & Schuster, 1979). RM would like to thank Erik Rebain for tracking down Eliot’s Athenaeum review , and F. Martinetti for her notes on Valerie Eliot’s edition of the annotated The Waste Land, but all errors of judgment remain the author’s own .