23 pages • 46 minutes read
T. S. EliotThe Hollow Men
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1925A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
“The Hollow Men” was first published in 1925, when T.S. Eliot’s literary stardom was on the rise. It was written only a few years after Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which shares many similar themes and influences and is considered his most prominent work. Both are considered part of the Modernist movement, which was characterized by a shift away from the more lyrical and pastoral poems of past generations toward the modern experience of innovation, industry, and urban living. These poems experimented more with shape and form, as Eliot does here.
Like “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men” uses patchwork motifs from other literary sources (perhaps a predecessor of the “found poetry” and “blackout poetry” styles of today). In the epigraph, Eliot directly references Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899). The quote is a reference to Captain Kurtz, an ambitious ivory trader travelling through Africa. Although Kurtz is personally and financially successful, other characters comment on the hollowness and immortality of the character. By using his death as the poem’s opening line, the poet frames this piece as the potential next stage in this character’s “hollow” journey. Kurtz’s misrule and misappropriation of power in the novella parallels Eliot’s own fear of the effects of the World War I on European civilization.
The poem also contains numerous references to Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet with a marked influence on Eliot’s work. There is an allusion to the river Acheron, which featured prominently in Dante’s Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy (c. 1321). Likewise, the “Multifoliate rose” (Line 64) referenced in the fourth canto echoes Dante’s description in Paradiso, in which the poet compares heaven to a multi-petalled rose. In response to the political and social upheaval happening around him, Eliot drew from a range of literary sources to make sense of what he was experiencing.
Sociohistorical Context
“The Hollow Men,” and many other poems from T.S. Eliot’s body of work, is strongly influenced by his experiences in a world ravaged by World War I. Although Eliot was not a soldier himself, he knew and lost several friends who were. A war that had in its early stages been seen as noble and glorious was becoming more and more disenchanting and unjustifiable; Eliot, and many writers and artists like him, began to lose faith in humanity and see themselves and loved ones as increasingly hollow. In “The Hollow Men,” the speaker and their compatriots are caught in a place that is neither heaven nor hell; there is a sense that this may be where many of the war’s soldiers ended up, setting out to do the right thing but ultimately giving up their humanity for its pursuit.
Another political influence that Eliot heavily alludes to is the Catholic revolutionary antihero Guy Fawkes, who attempted to blow up the London Parliament building in the 17th century. The effort was unsuccessful. Now, Britain celebrates “Guy Fawkes Day” every fifth of November, in which children go door to door asking for a “penny for the guy” and build straw effigies (meant to resemble Guy Fawkes), which are then symbolically burnt. This creates another connection between “hollow men” and war efforts across time.
In contrast to these suggestions of madness and bloodshed, the poem also incorporates elements from the traditional children’s rhyme “Here we go round the Mulberry Bush.” It is thought to have derived from a prison in which women paraded around a mulberry tree each morning. It has also been linked to early attempts at silk production in England. In the poem’s fifth canto, the hollow men sing a version of this poem that centers around a cactus, rather than a mulberry tree. In the final lines of the poem, they sing a different version of it about the end of the world.
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By T. S. Eliot
