The Hollow Men

Eliot's characters often undergo a journey – either physical or spiritual or both. The Hollow Men seems to follow the otherworldly journey of the spiritually dead. These "hollow men" have the realization, humility and acknowledgement of their guilt and their status as broken, lost souls.

The "hollow men" fail to transform their motions into actions, conception to creation, desire to fulfillment. This awareness of the split between thought and action coupled with their awareness of "death's various kingdoms" and acute diagnosis of their hollowness, makes it hard for them to go forward and break through their spiritual sterility. And as the poem and their journey ends, they see "the horror, the horror" that Kurtz sees in the Heart of Darkness. There is a complete breakdown of language, prayer and the spirit as "the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper".

Eliot wrote that he produced the title "The Hollow Men" by combining the titles of the romance "The Hollow Land" by William Morris with the poem "The Broken Men" by Rudyard Kipling:[5] 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 epigraphs 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, 5 November. Eliot's title, "The Hollow Men", obliquely acknowledges the bonfires which accompany the celebration of All Hallows' Eve, falling on 31 October, which particularly in the United States were conflated with Guy Fawkes' celebrations over the course of the 19th century.

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, wish to 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 cantos 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. Other significant references include the Lord's Prayer, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands ("Life is very long"). The final stanza may be the most quoted 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.[1]

Asked in 1958 if he would write these lines again, Eliot said he would not, according to Henry Hewes: "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."[6]

The poem was first published as now known on 23 November 1925, in Eliot's Poems: 1909–1925. Eliot was known to collect poems and fragments of poems to produce new works. This is clear to see in his poems The Hollow Men and "Ash-Wednesday" 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 French 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 last I 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)[7]

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. One source states that the last four lines of the poem are "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English."[4][8] The sheer variety of references moves some of the questions concerning the poem's significance outside the traditional domain of literary criticism and into the much broader category of cultural studies. Examples of such influences include:

• Gunpowder Plot in popular culture
• Heat death of the universe

• Text of the poem with notes
• Scans of the 1925 publication of the poem, in a 1934 reprint