The Hollow Men
Encyclopedia
The Hollow Men is a major poem by T. S. Eliot
. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognised to be concerned most with post-World War I
Europe
under the Treaty of Versailles
(which Eliot despised: compare "Gerontion
"), the difficulty of hope
and religious conversion
, and, as some critics argue, Eliot's own failed marriage (Vivienne Eliot may have been having an affair with Bertrand Russell
). The poem is divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines.
with the poem "The Broken Men" by Rudyard Kipling
: but it is possible that this is one of Eliot's many constructed allusions, and that the title originates more transparently from Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
or from the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad
's Heart of Darkness
who is referred to as a "hollow sham" and "hollow at the core".
The two epigraph
s to the poem, "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" and "A penny for the Old Guy", are allusions to Conrad's character and to Guy Fawkes
, attempted arsonist of the English house of Parliament, and his straw-man effigy that is burned each year in the United Kingdom
on Guy Fawkes Night
.
Some critics read the poem as told from three perspectives, each representing a phase of the passing of a soul
into one of death's kingdoms ("death's dream kingdom", "death's twilight kingdom", and "death's other kingdom"). Eliot describes how we, the living, will be seen by "Those who have crossed|With direct eyes [...] not as lost|Violent souls, but only|As the hollow men|The stuffed men." The image of eyes figures prominently in the poem, notably in one of Eliot's most famous lines "Eyes I dare not meet in dreams". Such eyes are also generally accepted to be in reference to Dante
's Beatrice (see below).
The poet depicts figures "Gathered on this beach of the tumid river" — drawing considerable influence from Dante's third and fourth canto
s of the Inferno which describes Limbo
, the first circle of Hell
- showing man in his inability to cross into Hell itself or to even beg redemption, unable to speak with God
. Dancing "round the prickly pear
," the figures worship false gods
, recalling children and reflecting Eliot's interpretation of Western culture after World War I
.
The final stanza
may be the most quoted of all of Eliot's poetry;
This last line alludes to, amongst some talk of war, the actual end of the Gunpowder Plot
mentioned at the beginning: not with its planned bang, but with Guy Fawkes
's whimper, as he was caught, tortured and executed on the gallows.
Perhaps most revealing, though, is that when asked if he would write these lines again, Eliot responded with a 'no':
Other significant references include the Lord's Prayer
, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
, and Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands
("Life is very long").
, reviewing Eliot’s new volume in 1926, perceived a shift in Eliot’s method and noted that, ‘'The mythologies disappear altogether in The Hollow Men’—a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante
as anything else in Eliot’s early work, to say little of the modern English mythology — the ‘Old Guy [Fawkes]’ of the Gunpowder Plot—or the colonial and agrarian
mythos of Conrad
and Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual history, echoes The Waste Land
. The ‘continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ that is so characteristic of his mythical method remains in fine form.
Yet Tate is right to point that the practice of this method has indeed changed. Moving away from the bathos and ironic deflation of Eliot’s earlier work, the mocking juxtapositions of Tiresias
and the figure of the (sexually, spiritually) exhausted typist have disappeared, leaving the pathos of mental and spiritual exhaustion to deepen even beyond ‘What the Thunder Said’ — The Hollow Men, as Eliot once put it to Pound
, was ‘post-Waste’. (This is not to say that such ironic juxtaposition does not happen at all — it does, for instance, occur in each chorus, which seems variably to be made of ‘the hollow men’ and children at play — but this, too, is used to amplify the new emphasis of the poetry.) Rather than enriching a single plane of existence — The Waste Land, for all its mythic expansions, is, like Ulysses
, ultimately grounded in the life of a particular city — The Hollow Men is one of the earliest poems to seriously attempt the ‘doubleness’ of action that Eliot later called characteristic of ‘poetic drama’:
If The Waste Land’s London
, then, shaped by a comparison to Dante’s Limbo
(‘I had not thought death had undone so many’), it remains an imaginary, ‘Unreal’ London, but a London nonetheless. The ‘doubleness’ of The Hollow Men, both London and Limbo with its ‘tumid river’ and its ‘wind’s singing’, brings the worldly and the religious into a poetry whose spiritual pregnancy seems well aligned with Eliot’s conversion soon after.
This period was, in various ways, a kind of extended ‘dark night of the soul
’. He was struggling with the failure of Sweeney Agonistes —‘...even Pound thought it might now be “too late” for him’—and his relations to his estranged wife, Vivienne, were continuing to disintegrate; and, since critics like Edmund Wilson
, reviewing Ash Wednesday
in 1930, could look back on The Hollow Men as ‘the nadir of the phase of despair and desolation’, it is all too tempting to look for expressions of the biographical moment in the poem. Indeed, some, like Bernard Bergonzi
, have seen elements of the ‘process poem’ in it: ‘it has the teasing fascination of an almost-erased inscription’; the failed religious conversion echoing Eliot’s failed play and, perhaps, failed marriage vows.
Eliot, of course, did convert soon after; things could only get just so bad with Vivienne; and he was, finally, able to take much from Sweeny Agonistes: Peter Ackroyd suggests that its dramatic form contributed to the clearer, simpler imagism and the ‘uncomplicated accentual meter’ of The Hollow Men. And, if many critics read The Hollow Men as the conclusion to Eliot’s Inferno
—with Ash Wednesday beginning the Purgatorio
—it is interesting that Ronald Bush
, after a study of the textual sources, finds something of the Vita Nuova
here: ‘Psychologically, the drama moves downward from resistance to submission, but spiritually it moves upward from proud isolation through humility to a thirst for divine love.’ This interpretation assumes, of course, that the eyes ‘I dare not meet in dreams’ are an echo of Dante’s Beatrice, spied but avoided because of shame across the lost Eden
ic waters in the Purgatorio.
" where he incorporated previously published poems to become sections of a larger work. In the case of The Hollow Men four of the five sections of the poem were previously published:
(Publication information from Gallup)
, Waking Life
) to video games (Fable II, the Halo
series, and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty) to Japanese literature (the novels of Haruki Murakami
) to American television shows (30 Rock
, Frasier
, Mad Men
, and The X-Files
("Pusher
" episode)). Stephen King
used Eliot's stanza to begin his novel, The Stand
. The poem is the source of the title for Nevil Shute
's On the Beach
.
Sheer variety of reference moves some of the questions concerning the poem's significance outside the traditional domain of literary criticism
—where Harold Bloom
, for one, often half-laments Eliot's influence—and into the much broader category of cultural studies
. Here, its history has itself become an object for meditation in the work of many critics and artists, including, for instance, film essayist Chris Marker
.
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognised to be concerned most with post-World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
under the Treaty of Versailles
Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of...
(which Eliot despised: compare "Gerontion
Gerontion
"Gerontion" is a poem by T. S. Eliot that was first published in 1920. The work relates the opinions and impressions of a gerontic, or elderly man, through a dramatic monologue which describes Europe after World War I through the eyes of a man who has lived the majority of his life in the 19th...
"), the difficulty of hope
Hope
Hope is the emotional state which promotes the belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. It is the "feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best" or the act of "look[ing] forward to with desire and reasonable confidence" or...
and religious conversion
Religious conversion
Religious conversion is the adoption of a new religion that differs from the convert's previous religion. Changing from one denomination to another within the same religion is usually described as reaffiliation rather than conversion.People convert to a different religion for various reasons,...
, and, as some critics argue, Eliot's own failed marriage (Vivienne Eliot may have been having an affair with Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
). The poem is divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines.
Overview
Eliot wrote that he produced the title "The Hollow Men" by combining the titles of the romance "The Hollow Land" by William MorrisWilliam Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
with the poem "The Broken Men" by Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
: but it is possible that this is one of Eliot's many constructed allusions, and that the title originates more transparently from Shakespeare's
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar (play)
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, also known simply as Julius Caesar, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1599. It portrays the 44 BC conspiracy against...
or from the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
's Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" and part of the Western canon.The story centres on Charles...
who is referred to as a "hollow sham" and "hollow at the core".
The two epigraph
Epigraph (literature)
In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component. The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional...
s to the poem, "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" and "A penny for the Old Guy", are allusions to Conrad's character and to Guy Fawkes
Guy Fawkes
Guy Fawkes , also known as Guido Fawkes, the name he adopted while fighting for the Spanish in the Low Countries, belonged to a group of provincial English Catholics who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605.Fawkes was born and educated in York...
, attempted arsonist of the English house of Parliament, and his straw-man effigy that is burned each year in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
on Guy Fawkes Night
Guy Fawkes Night
Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night and Firework Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in England. Its history begins with the events of 5 November 1605, when Guy Fawkes, a member of the Gunpowder Plot, was arrested while guarding...
.
Some critics read the poem as told from three perspectives, each representing a phase of the passing of a soul
Soul
A soul in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach that humans have souls, and others teach that all living things and even inanimate objects have souls. The...
into one of death's kingdoms ("death's dream kingdom", "death's twilight kingdom", and "death's other kingdom"). Eliot describes how we, the living, will be seen by "Those who have crossed|With direct eyes [...] not as lost|Violent souls, but only|As the hollow men|The stuffed men." The image of eyes figures prominently in the poem, notably in one of Eliot's most famous lines "Eyes I dare not meet in dreams". Such eyes are also generally accepted to be in reference to Dante
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
's Beatrice (see below).
The poet depicts figures "Gathered on this beach of the tumid river" — drawing considerable influence from Dante's third and fourth canto
Long poem
The long poem is a literary genre including all poetry of considerable length. Though the definition of a long poem is vague and broad, the genre includes some of the most important poetry ever written....
s of the Inferno which describes Limbo
Limbo
In the theology of the Catholic Church, Limbo is a speculative idea about the afterlife condition of those who die in original sin without being assigned to the Hell of the damned. Limbo is not an official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church or any other...
, the first circle of Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
- showing man in his inability to cross into Hell itself or to even beg redemption, unable to speak with God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
. Dancing "round the prickly pear
Opuntia
Opuntia, also known as nopales or paddle cactus , is a genus in the cactus family, Cactaceae.Currently, only prickly pears are included in this genus of about 200 species distributed throughout most of the Americas. Chollas are now separated into the genus Cylindropuntia, which some still consider...
," the figures worship false gods
Idolatry
Idolatry is a pejorative term for the worship of an idol, a physical object such as a cult image, as a god, or practices believed to verge on worship, such as giving undue honour and regard to created forms other than God. In all the Abrahamic religions idolatry is strongly forbidden, although...
, recalling children and reflecting Eliot's interpretation of Western culture after World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
.
The final stanza
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
may be the most quoted of all of Eliot's poetry;
- This is the way the world ends
- This is the way the world ends
- This is the way the world ends
- Not with a bang but a whimper.
This last line alludes to, amongst some talk of war, the actual end of the Gunpowder Plot
Gunpowder Plot
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England and VI of Scotland by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby.The plan was to blow up the House of...
mentioned at the beginning: not with its planned bang, but with Guy Fawkes
Guy Fawkes
Guy Fawkes , also known as Guido Fawkes, the name he adopted while fighting for the Spanish in the Low Countries, belonged to a group of provincial English Catholics who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605.Fawkes was born and educated in York...
's whimper, as he was caught, tortured and executed on the gallows.
Perhaps most revealing, though, is that when asked if he would write these lines again, Eliot responded with a 'no':
One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone's mind. Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either. People whose houses were bombed have told him they don't remember hearing anything.
Other significant references include the Lord's Prayer
Lord's Prayer
The Lord's Prayer is a central prayer in Christianity. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, it appears in two forms: in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the discourse on ostentation in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Gospel of Luke, which records Jesus being approached by "one of his...
, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar (play)
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, also known simply as Julius Caesar, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1599. It portrays the 44 BC conspiracy against...
, and Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands
An Outcast of the Islands
An Outcast of the Islands is the second novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1896, inspired by Conrad's experience as mate of a steamer, the Vigar....
("Life is very long").
Critical reception and Eliot's career
Allen TateAllen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...
, reviewing Eliot’s new volume in 1926, perceived a shift in Eliot’s method and noted that, ‘'The mythologies disappear altogether in The Hollow Men’—a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
as anything else in Eliot’s early work, to say little of the modern English mythology — the ‘Old Guy [Fawkes]’ of the Gunpowder Plot—or the colonial and agrarian
Agrarianism
Agrarianism has two common meanings. The first meaning refers to a social philosophy or political philosophy which values rural society as superior to urban society, the independent farmer as superior to the paid worker, and sees farming as a way of life that can shape the ideal social values...
mythos of Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
and Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual history, echoes The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
. The ‘continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ that is so characteristic of his mythical method remains in fine form.
Yet Tate is right to point that the practice of this method has indeed changed. Moving away from the bathos and ironic deflation of Eliot’s earlier work, the mocking juxtapositions of Tiresias
Tiresias
In Greek mythology, Tiresias was a blind prophet of Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. He was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo; Tiresias participated fully in seven generations at Thebes, beginning as advisor to Cadmus...
and the figure of the (sexually, spiritually) exhausted typist have disappeared, leaving the pathos of mental and spiritual exhaustion to deepen even beyond ‘What the Thunder Said’ — The Hollow Men, as Eliot once put it to Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, was ‘post-Waste’. (This is not to say that such ironic juxtaposition does not happen at all — it does, for instance, occur in each chorus, which seems variably to be made of ‘the hollow men’ and children at play — but this, too, is used to amplify the new emphasis of the poetry.) Rather than enriching a single plane of existence — The Waste Land, for all its mythic expansions, is, like Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
, ultimately grounded in the life of a particular city — The Hollow Men is one of the earliest poems to seriously attempt the ‘doubleness’ of action that Eliot later called characteristic of ‘poetic drama’:
‘We sometimes feel, in following the words and behavior of some of the characters of Dostoevsky, that they are living at once on the plane we know and on some other place of reality from which we are shut out.’
If The Waste Land’s London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, then, shaped by a comparison to Dante’s Limbo
Limbo
In the theology of the Catholic Church, Limbo is a speculative idea about the afterlife condition of those who die in original sin without being assigned to the Hell of the damned. Limbo is not an official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church or any other...
(‘I had not thought death had undone so many’), it remains an imaginary, ‘Unreal’ London, but a London nonetheless. The ‘doubleness’ of The Hollow Men, both London and Limbo with its ‘tumid river’ and its ‘wind’s singing’, brings the worldly and the religious into a poetry whose spiritual pregnancy seems well aligned with Eliot’s conversion soon after.
This period was, in various ways, a kind of extended ‘dark night of the soul
Dark Night of the Soul
Dark Night of the Soul is a treatise by Saint John of the Cross containing a commentary explaining his poem of the same name.-Poem and treatise by Saint John of the Cross:...
’. He was struggling with the failure of Sweeney Agonistes —‘...even Pound thought it might now be “too late” for him’—and his relations to his estranged wife, Vivienne, were continuing to disintegrate; and, since critics like Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...
, reviewing Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday (poem)
"Ash Wednesday" is the first long poem written by T. S. Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930 , this poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem",...
in 1930, could look back on The Hollow Men as ‘the nadir of the phase of despair and desolation’, it is all too tempting to look for expressions of the biographical moment in the poem. Indeed, some, like Bernard Bergonzi
Bernard Bergonzi
Bernard Bergonzi is a British literary scholar, critic and poet. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Warwick and an expert on T. S. Eliot.He was born in London and studied at the University of Oxford...
, have seen elements of the ‘process poem’ in it: ‘it has the teasing fascination of an almost-erased inscription’; the failed religious conversion echoing Eliot’s failed play and, perhaps, failed marriage vows.
Eliot, of course, did convert soon after; things could only get just so bad with Vivienne; and he was, finally, able to take much from Sweeny Agonistes: Peter Ackroyd suggests that its dramatic form contributed to the clearer, simpler imagism and the ‘uncomplicated accentual meter’ of The Hollow Men. And, if many critics read The Hollow Men as the conclusion to Eliot’s Inferno
The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature...
—with Ash Wednesday beginning the Purgatorio
The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature...
—it is interesting that Ronald Bush
Ronald Bush
Ronald George Bush in Auckland. He played one test match for the All Blacks in 1931 and he was also a New Zealand cricketer who played 10 first-class matches for the Auckland Aces in the mid-1930's....
, after a study of the textual sources, finds something of the Vita Nuova
Vita Nuova
Vita Nuova Holdings Ltd is a British company based in York that provides technology for embedded systems and distributed applications based upon the unique operating system Inferno. It also distributes the Plan 9 operating system....
here: ‘Psychologically, the drama moves downward from resistance to submission, but spiritually it moves upward from proud isolation through humility to a thirst for divine love.’ This interpretation assumes, of course, that the eyes ‘I dare not meet in dreams’ are an echo of Dante’s Beatrice, spied but avoided because of shame across the lost Eden
Garden of Eden
The Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...
ic waters in the Purgatorio.
Publication information
The poem was first published as now known on November 23, 1925, in Eliot's Poems: 1909-1925. Eliot was known to collect poems and fragments of poems to produce new works. This is clearest to see in his poems The Hollow Men and "Ash-WednesdayAsh Wednesday (poem)
"Ash Wednesday" is the first long poem written by T. S. Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930 , this poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem",...
" where he incorporated previously published poems to become sections of a larger work. In the case of The Hollow Men four of the five sections of the poem were previously published:
- "Poème", published in the Winter 1924 edition of Commerce (with a FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
translation), became Part I of The Hollow Men.
- Doris's Dream Songs in the November 1924 issue of Chapbook had the three poems: "Eyes that I last saw in tears", "The wind sprang up at four o'clock", and "This is the dead land." The third poem became Part III of The Hollow Men.
- Three Eliot poems appeared in the January, 1925 issue of his Criterion magazine: "Eyes I dare not meet in dreams", "Eyes that I last saw in tears", and "The eyes are not here". The first poem became Part II of The Hollow Men and the third became Part IV.
- Additionally, the March 1925 of Dial published The Hollow Men, I-III which was finally transformed to The Hollow Men Parts I, II, and IV in Poems: 1909-1925.
(Publication information from Gallup)
Influence in culture
The Hollow Men has had a profound effect on the Anglo-American cultural lexicon and—by a relatively recent extension—world culture since it was published in 1925. References range from film (Apocalypse NowApocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American war film set during the Vietnam War, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The central character is US Army special operations officer Captain Benjamin L. Willard , of MACV-SOG, an assassin sent to kill the renegade and presumed insane Special Forces...
, Waking Life
Waking Life
Waking Life is an American animated film , directed by Richard Linklater and released in 2001. The entire film was shot using digital video and then a team of artists using computers drew stylized lines and colors over each frame.The film focuses on the nature of dreams, consciousness, and...
) to video games (Fable II, the Halo
Halo (series)
Halo is a multi-million dollar science fiction video game franchise created by Bungie and now managed by 343 Industries and owned by Microsoft Studios. The series centers on an interstellar war between humanity and a theocratic alliance of aliens known as the Covenant...
series, and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty) to Japanese literature (the novels of Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami
is a Japanese writer and translator. His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered him critical acclaim and numerous awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and Jerusalem Prize among others.He is considered an important figure in postmodern literature...
) to American television shows (30 Rock
30 Rock
30 Rock is an American television comedy series created by Tina Fey that airs on NBC. The series is loosely based on Fey's experiences as head writer for Saturday Night Live...
, Frasier
Frasier
Frasier is an American sitcom that was broadcast on NBC for eleven seasons, from September 16, 1993, to May 13, 2004. The program was created and produced by David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee in association with Grammnet and Paramount Network Television.A spin-off of Cheers, Frasier stars...
, Mad Men
Mad Men
Mad Men is an American dramatic television series created and produced by Matthew Weiner. The series premiered on Sunday evenings on the American cable network AMC and are produced by Lionsgate Television. It premiered on July 19, 2007, and completed its fourth season on October 17, 2010. Each...
, and The X-Files
The X-Files
The X-Files is an American science fiction television series and a part of The X-Files franchise, created by screenwriter Chris Carter. The program originally aired from to . The show was a hit for the Fox network, and its characters and slogans became popular culture touchstones in the 1990s...
("Pusher
Pusher (The X-Files)
"Pusher" is a 1996 episode of The X-Files television series. It was the seventeenth episode broadcast in the show's third season. "Pusher" surrounds the agents' pursuit of a serial killer who can convince people to do whatever he says.- Plot :...
" episode)). Stephen King
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
used Eliot's stanza to begin his novel, The Stand
The Stand
The Stand is a post-apocalyptic horror/fantasy novel by American author Stephen King. It demonstrates the scenario in his earlier short story, Night Surf...
. The poem is the source of the title for Nevil Shute
Nevil Shute
Nevil Shute Norway was a popular British-Australian novelist and a successful aeronautical engineer. He used his full name in his engineering career, and 'Nevil Shute' as his pen name, in order to protect his engineering career from any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels.-...
's On the Beach
On the Beach
On the Beach is a post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world novel written by British-Australian author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia. It was published in 1957....
.
Sheer variety of reference moves some of the questions concerning the poem's significance outside the traditional domain of literary criticism
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
—where Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
, for one, often half-laments Eliot's influence—and into the much broader category of cultural studies
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...
. Here, its history has itself become an object for meditation in the work of many critics and artists, including, for instance, film essayist Chris Marker
Chris Marker
Chris Marker is a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée , A Grin Without a Cat , Sans Soleil and AK , an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa...
.