Our interest in this essay is to focus on the figure of the older human being, what we call the Senex, which seems to be an archetype in all human cultures and historical periods. Our approach is emergentist, that is, it is interested in phenomena whose wholes are greater than the sum of their parts, whose origin is autopoietic and whose continued existence is self-maintaining. We are less interested in fixing what goes wrong with young people when they age, than in what grows and deepens in people more than 65 years old. While the disciplines listed in the Gerontological Society of America’s mission statement above use various versions of the analytical and reductive methods of normal science and scholarship, we offer a more synthesizing and holistic perspective on the issues surrounding the Senex. That perspective includes a historical glance at the issue itself and chooses as collaborators a group of poets from two great culture areas past and present, poets who have deeply understood the individual and collective nature of the aging process.