Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri of New England descent, on Sept. 26,
1888. He entered Harvard University in 1906, completed his courses in three years and
earned a master's degree the next year. After a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, he
returned to Harvard. Further study led him to Merton College, Oxford, and he decided to
stay in England. He worked first as a teacher and then in Lloyd's Bank until 1925. Then
he joined the London publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, becoming director when the firm
became Faber and Faber in 1929. Eliot won the Nobel prize for literature in 1948 and
other major literary awards.
Eliot saw an exhausted poetic mode being employed, that contained no verbal excitement
or original craftsmanship, by the Georgian poets who were active when he settled in
London. He sought to make poetry more subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more
precise. He learned the necessity of clear and precise images, and he learned too, to
fear romantic softness and to regard the poetic medium rather than the poet's personality
as the important factor. Eliot saw in the French symbolists how image could be both
absolutely precise in what it referred to physically and at the same time endlessly
suggestive in the meanings it set up because of its relationship to other images.
Eliot's real novelty was his deliberate elimination of all merely connective and
transitional passages, his building up of the total pattern of meaning through the
immediate comparison of images without overt explanation of what they are doing, together
with his use of indirect references to other works of literature (some at times quite
obscure).
Eliot starts his poem "The Hollow Men" with a quote from Joseph Conrad's novel the Heart
of Darkness. The line "Mistah Kurtz-he dead" refers to a Mr. Kurtz who was a European
trader who had gone in the "the heart of darkness" by traveling into the central African
jungle, with European standards of life and conduct. Because he has no moral or
spiritual strength to sustain him, he was soon turned into a barbarian. He differs,
however, from Eliot's "hollow men" as he is not paralyzed as they are , but on his death
catches a glimpse of the nature of his actions when he claims "The horror! the Horror!"
Kurtz is thus one of the "lost /Violent souls" mentioned in lines 15-16. Eliot next
continues with "A penny for the Old Guy". This is a reference to the cry of English
children soliciting money for fireworks to commemorate Guy Fawkes day, November 5; which
commemorates the "gunpowder plot" of 1605 in which Guy Fawkes and other conspirators
planned to blow up both houses of Parliament. On this day, which commemorates the
failure of the explosion, the likes of Fawkes are burned in effigy and mock explosions
using fireworks are produced. The relation of this custom to the poem suggests another
inference: as the children make a game of make believe out of Guy Fawkes , so do we make
a game out of religion.
The first lines bring the title and theme into a critical relationship. We are like the
"Old Guy", effigies stuffed with straw. It may also be noticed that the first and last
part of the poem indicate a church service, and the ritual service throughout. This is
indicated in the passages "Leaning together...whisper together", and the voices "quiet
and meaningless" as the service drones on. The erstwhile worshippers disappear in a blur
of shape, shade gesture, to which normality is attached. Then the crucial orientation is
developed, towards "death's other Kingdom." We know that we are in the Kingdom of
death, not as "violent souls" but as empty effigies, "filled with straw", of this
religious service.
Part two defines the hollow men in relation to the reality with those "direct eyes have
met". "Direct eyes" symbolizing those who represent something positive (direct).
Fortunately, the eyes he dare not meet even in dreams do not appear in "death's dream
kingdom." They are only reflected through broken light and shadows, all is perceived
indirectly. He would not be any nearer , any more direct, in this twilight kingdom. He
fears the ultimate vision.
Part three defines the representation of death's kingdom in relationship to the worship
of the hollow men. A dead, arid land, like it's people, it raises stone images of the
spiritual, which are implored by the dead. And again the "fading star" establishes a
sense of remoteness from reality. The image of frustrated love which follows is a moment
of anguished illumination suspended between the two kingdoms of death. Lips that would
adore, pray instead to a broken image. The "broken stone" unites the "stone images" and
the broken column," which bent the sunlight.
Part four explores this impulse in relation to the land, which now darkens progressively
as the valley of the shadow of death. Now there are not even hints of the eyes (of the
positive), and the "fading" becomes the "dying" star. In action the hollow men now
"grope together / And avoid speech", gathered on the banks of the swollen river which
must be crossed to get to "death's other kingdom". The contrast with part I is clear.
Without any eyes at all they are without any vision, unless "the eyes" return as the
"perpetual", not a fading or dying star. But for empty men this is only a hope. As the
star becomes a rose, so the rose becomes the rose windows of the church; the rose as an
image of the church and multifoliate. Which is a reference to Dante's Divine Comedy,
where the multifoliate rose is a symbol of paradise, in which the saints are the petals
of the rose.
But Part Five develops the reality, not the hope of the empty men; the cactus not the
rose. The nursery level make believe mocks the hope of empty men. In desire they "go
round the prickly pear" but are frustrated by the prickles. The poem now develops the
frustration of impulse. At various levels, and in various aspects of life, there falls
the frustrating shadow of fear, the essential shadow of this land. Yet the shadow is
more than fear: it concentrates the valley of shadow into a shape of horror, almost a
personification of its negative character. The passage from the Lord's Prayer relates
the Shadow to religion, with irony in the attribution. Next the response about the
length of life relates it to the burden of life. Lastly the Lord's Prayer again relates
the Shadow to the Kingdom that is so hard. This repetition follows the conflict of the
series that produces life itself, frustrating the essence from descent to being. This is
the essential irony of their impaired lives. The end comes by way of ironic completion
as the nursery rhyme again takes up its repetitive round, and terminates with the line
that characterizes the evasive excuse. They are the whimpers of fear with which the
hollow men end, neither the bang of Guy Fawkes day nor the "lost violent soul."
In part Five the frustration of reality is described by the abstractions introduced in
Part I; life is frustrated at every level, and this accounts for the nature of the land
and the character of its people. By placing G-d in a casual relation to this condition,
the poem develops an irony which results in the "whimper". But the most devastating
irony is formal: the extension of game ritual in liturgical form.
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