The Hollow Men - T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri,  on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate.

After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd’s Bank.

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot’s reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.

As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (most notably John Donne) and the nineteenth century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post–World War I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poetry collections include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets(1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.

He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He died in London on January 4, 1965.

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The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)

Four Quartets (1943)

Burnt Norton (1941)

The Dry Salvages (1941)

East Coker (1940)

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Ash Wednesday (1930)

Poems, 1909–1925 (1925)

The Waste Land (1922)

Poems (1919)

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

Prose

The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)

Poetry and Drama (1951)

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)

The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)

The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)

Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)

Elizabethan Essays (1934)

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)

After Strange Gods (1933)

John Dryden (1932)

Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)

Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)

Dante (1929)

For Lancelot Andrews (1928)

Andrew Marvell (1922)

The Sacred Wood (1920)

Drama

The Confidential Clerk (1953)

The Cocktail Party (1950)

The Family Reunion (1939)

Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

The Rock (1934)

Sweeney Agonistes (1932)

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Collected Poems (1962)

Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)

The Elder Statesman (1958)

From: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/t-s-eliot

The Hollow Men (1925)

by 

T.S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz - he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy


I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of this tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

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 with a whimper. 

Notes:

1. Mistah Kurtz: a character in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

2. A...Old Guy: a cry of English children on the streets on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, when they carry straw effigies of Guy Fawkes and beg for money for fireworks to celebrate the day. Fawkes was a traitor who attempted with conspirators to blow up both houses of Parliament in 1605; the "gunpowder plot" failed.

3. Those...Kingdom: Those who have represented something positive and direct are blessed in Paradise. The reference is to Dante's "Paradiso". 

4. Eyes: eyes of those in eternity who had faith and confidence and were a force that acted and were not paralyzed.

5. crossed stave: refers to scarecrows

6. tumid river: swollen river. The River Acheron in Hell in Dante's "Inferno". The damned must cross this river to get to the land of the dead.

7. Multifoliate rose: in dante's "Divine Comedy" paradise is described as a rose of many leaves.

8. prickly pear: cactus

9. Between...act: a reference to "Julius Caesar" "Between the acting of a dreadful thing/And the first motion, all the interim is/Like a phantasma or a hideous dream."

10. For...Kingdom: the beginning of the closing words of the Lord's Prayer. © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes

Influence: Received and Gained

The Heart of Darkness was written and said to be referenced to several pieces of works in literature, but the first two lines in the poem directly allude to Kurtz from Heart of Darkness and to Guy Fawkes, an attempted arsonist of the English house of Parliament, "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" and "A penny for the Old Guy" respectively. The entire poem resembles that exactly of Kurtz, Marlow, and the other characters portrayed in the novella. It states much of the same themes and messages of the book, and the question of moral seems to be the common theme among the film, book, and the poem. The poem is timeless and is still referenced to today's society of men working in the corporate industry. 

In a scene in Apocalypse Now, Kurtz is reading Eliot's work towards the end of the film along with his other books ranging from the Holy Bible to The Golden Bough. Besides the adaptation from the novel, Coppola uses the idea of incorporating the poem into the film not just as a theme, but using the physical prose as a line in the film. This shows not only the importance of the poem to the film, but the personal level of relatability that was able to be had on Colonel Kurtz from the film. Indeed, the poem is about his character portrayed from the version of the book. 

"Shape without form, shade without colour, 
Paralysed force, gesture without motion"

"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 with a whimper"