The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot

First published: 1925, in Poems, 1909-1925

Type of poem: Dramatic monologue

The Poem

“The Hollow Men” is both a single hundred-line poem and a sequence of five poems (or parts). Although almost entirely lacking in simple narrative cohesiveness and linear development, and defying simple classification (“The Hollow Men” is at once dramatic monologue, soliloquy, choric ode, lyric, elegy, and meditation), T. S. Eliot’s highly and at times allegorically abstract text nevertheless achieves a remarkable unity of effect in terms of voice, mood, and imagery. The simplicity and seeming transparency of the title—a conflation of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (c. 1599-1600) and poems by Rudyard Kipling and William Morris—serve as an ironic indicator of Eliot’s rich and complex texture. The two epigraphs—one from Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness (1899), and the other a child’s line from the yearly observance of Guy Fawkes Day (November 5) in England—serve a similar purpose; they contextualize the poem literarily and historically while underscoring the poem’s thematization of spiritual hollowness and failure of will.

The poem is chiefly narrated in the first-person plural; a “we” that serves to broaden the speaker’s predicament beyond the individual to encompass a more nearly universal figure who is emblematic of his age and who may well be speaking for, as well as to, the reader. Against the dying Kurtz’s last words, “The horror! The horror!” in Heart of Darkness, Eliot’s narrator can only rouse himself to utter a “quiet and meaningless” “Alas!” of resignation and despair.

The very fact that this “we” does speak (although monotonously) holds out at least the possibility that this “we” is not yet completely resigned to human inconsequentiality and to a spiritual void—that, whether from guilt or from need, “we” yearns for something more. The wasteland depicted here looks back to Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land but more especially to Dante’s Inferno (c. 1320). “We” are modern-day versions of Dante’s tormented souls suffering in “our” low-grade way the pain of loss, whispering rather than howling. The Dantean allusion helps to explain the otherwise inexplicable shift from plural “we” to singular “I” in part 2 and helps explain the intensification of wasteland and inferno imagery here and in part 3. Part 4 holds out the distinct, slight possibility of redemption for those otherwise condemned to groping blindly “in this valley of dying stars,” of dying hope.

On the very verge of entering the saving (baptismal) waters of “the tumid river,” of crossing over Eliot’s version of the River Styx from the land of death in life to that of life in death, the choric narrator fails to make the necessary Kierkegaardian leap of faith. He remains where he is, poised between spiritual as well as sexual sterility and the promise of a redemption, which, he also perceives, holds the threat of judgment and damnation.

The fifth and concluding section is structurally the most complex and thematically the most disturbing. The unresolved mix of pronouncements, prayer, and nursery rhyme (with its substitution of “prickly pear” for “mulberry bush”) offers no entry into purgatory, no glimpse of paradise. Instead, it leaves speaker and reader alike still poised between two states of being and therefore still very much in the grip of paralyzing despair.

Forms and Devices

In his review of James Joyce’s prototypical high modernist novel, Ulysses (1922), written at the very time he began work on the poems that would later make up “The Hollow Men,” Eliot explained that “in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.…It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Eliot had himself already employed the mythic method to devastating effect in The Waste Land. That method, along with the richly allusive style to which it is closely tied, plays a less insistent but arguably more integral role in giving shape and direction to the considerably less diversified but still disconcerting flux of materials (or “stuffing”) from which Eliot assembled “The Hollow Men.”

Rudyard Kipling, William Morris, Joseph Conrad, William Shakespeare, Ernest Dowson, and Paul Valéry play their parts, but none so importantly, pervasively, and unobtrusively as Dante. His Divine Comedy (c. 1320) serves as both the foundation upon which Eliot’s otherwise fragmented text rests and as the yardstick by which the choric speaker’s spiritual plight may be measured. The point of the mythic method is not to show how far modern man has fallen from some nostalgically regarded golden age, but to show how similar, even static, the human condition actually is. Such a procedure transforms Eliot’s paralyzed narrator into a figure capable of Dantean grandeur—and anguish.

In addition to perfecting the mythic method, Eliot began structuring his poetry in dramatic terms. The two procedures are in fact clearly connected, for Eliot’s interest in drama focused on its origin in primitive rituals. The choric voice and “drum-beat” rhythms of “The Hollow Men” manifest a dramatic quality that Eliot adds to and plays against the Dantean parallel. The prevalence of short lines, of elliptical and fragmentary phrasings, and the repetition of a handful of key words and images (eyes, shadow, and kingdom, for example), as well as the inclusion of two framing quasi-rituals (the children begging on Guy Fawkes Day and the “here we go round the mulberry bush” children’s rhyme), highlight the poem’s dramatic quality, even if they do not direct attention to it overtly, and add not only to the work’s incantatory effect but also make it at once mythic and modern, strangely primitive yet remarkably up-to-date.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.

Browne, Elliott Martin. The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet, T. S. Eliot. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.

Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898-1922. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1999.

Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of “The Waste Land.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.