The Hollow Men

About The Hollow Men

'''The Hollow Men''' (1925) is a major poem by T. S. Eliot, a Nobel Prize winning modernist poet. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognized to be concerned with: post-War Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised--compare 'Gerontion'); the difficulty of hope and religious conversion; and, as some critics argue, Eliot's failed marriage (Vivienne had been having an affair with Bertrand Russell).

The two epigraphs to the poem, "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" and "A penny for the Old Guy", are allusions to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness 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 Bonfire Night.

Some critics read the poem as told from five 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, will be seen by "those who have crossed with direct eyes... not as lost violent souls, but only as the hollow men — 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).