<P> There is a connection between Gerontion and Eliot's understanding of F.H. Bradley's views . In Eliot's doctoral dissertation, later published as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, Eliot explores Bradley's philosophy to determine how the mind relates to reality . By relying on Bradley, Eliot is able to formulate his own scepticism and states: "Everything, from one point of view, is subjective; and everything, from another point of view is objective; and there is no absolute point of view from which a decision may be pronounced ." In terms of poetic structure, Eliot was influenced by Jacobean dramatists such as Thomas Middleton that relied on blank verse in their dramatic monologues . Lines within the poems are connected to the works of a wide range of writers, including A.C. Benson, Lancelot Andrewes, and Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams . </P> <P> Eliot scholar Grover Smith says of this poem, "If any notion remained that in the poems of 1919 Eliot was sentimentally contrasting a resplendent past with a dismal present, Gerontion should have helped to dispel it ." Bernard Bergonzi writes that "Eliot's most considerable poem of the period between 1915 and 1919 is' Gerontion"'. Kirk believes that "To me, the blank verse of' Gerontion' is Eliot's most moving poetry, but he never tried this virile mode later ." </P> <P> The literary critic Anthony Julius, who has analysed the presence of anti-Semitic rhetoric in Eliot's work, has cited "Gerontion" as an example of a poem by Eliot that contains anti-Semitic sentiments . In the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, the poem contains the line, "And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner (of my building) / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp ." </P>

In gerontion what is the old man doing at the beginning of the poem