The Hollow Men

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For other uses, see The Hollow Men (disambiguation).

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).[1]

Contents

[edit] Overview

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).

The poet depicts figures, "gathered on the beach of [a] 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 a prickly pear," the figures worship false gods, recalling children and reflecting Eliot's interpretation of Western culture after World War I.

The final stanza may be the most quoted of all 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.

This last line alludes to, amongst some talk of war, the actual end of the Gunpowder Plot mentioned at the beginning: not with its planned bang, but with Guy Fawkes's whimper, as he was caught, tortured and executed on the gallows. Some critics, particularly Helen Gardner, have also pointed out a (perhaps un-Eliotic) note of hope insofar as that 'whimper' could be interpreted as the sound of a new-born.

Perhaps most revealing, though, is Eliot's response, a 'no', when asked if he would write these lines again:

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.[2]

Other significant references include the Lord's Prayer and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

[edit] Relation to Eliot's career

Allen Tate, reviewing Eliot’s new volume in 1926, perceived a shift in Eliot’s method and noted that, ‘'The mythologies disappear altogether in The Hollow Men’—a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliot’s early work, to say little of the modern English mythology — the ‘Old Guy [Fawkes]’ of the Gunpowder Plot—or the colonial and agrarian mythos of Conrad and Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual history, echoes The Waste Land.[3] The ‘continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ that is so characteristic of his mythical method remains in fine form.[4]

Yet Tate is right to point that the practice of this method has indeed changed. Moving away from the bathos and ironic deflation of Eliot’s earlier work, the mocking juxtapositions of Tiresias and the figure of the (sexually, spiritually) exhausted typist have disappeared, leaving the pathos of mental and spiritual exhaustion to deepen even beyond ‘What the Thunder Said’ — The Hollow Men, as Eliot once put it to Pound, was ‘post-Waste’.[5] (This is not to say that such ironic juxtaposition does not happen at all — it does, for instance, occur in each chorus, which seems variably to be made of ‘the hollow men’ and children at play — but this, too, is used to amplify the new emphasis of the poetry.) Rather than enriching a single plane of existence — The Waste Land, for all its mythic expansions, is, like Ulysses, ultimately grounded in the life of a particular city — The Hollow Men is one of the earliest poems to seriously attempt the ‘doubleness’ of action that Eliot later called characteristic of ‘poetic drama’:

‘We sometimes feel, in following the words and behavior of some of the characters of Dostoevsky, that they are living at once on the plane we know and on some other place of reality from which we are shut out.’[6]

If The Waste Land’s London, then, shaped by a comparison to Dante’s Limbo (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’), it remains an imaginary, ‘Unreal’ London, but a London nonetheless. The ‘doubleness’ of The Hollow Men, both London and Limbo with its ‘tumid river’ and its ‘wind’s singing’, brings the worldly and the religious into a poetry whose spiritual pregnancy seems well aligned with Eliot’s conversion soon after.

This period was, in various ways, a kind of extended ‘dark night of the soul’. He was struggling with the failure of Sweeney Agonistes —‘...even Pound thought it might now be “too late” for him’[7]—and his relations to his estranged wife, Vivienne, were continuing to disintegrate; and, since critics like Edmund Wilson, reviewing Ash Wednesday in 1930, could look back on The Hollow Men as ‘the nadir of the phase of despair and desolation’, it is all too tempting to look for expressions of the biographical moment in the poem.[8] Indeed, some, like Bernard Bergonzi, have seen elements of the ‘process poem’ in it: ‘it has the teasing fascination of an almost-erased inscription’; the failed religious conversion echoing Eliot’s failed play and, perhaps, failed marriage vows.[9]

Eliot, of course, did convert soon after; things could only get just so bad with Vivienne; and he was, finally, able to take much from Sweeny Agonistes: Peter Ackroyd suggests that its dramatic form contributed to the clearer, simpler imagism and the ‘uncomplicated accentual meter’ of The Hollow Men.[10] And, if many critics read The Hollow Men as the conclusion to Eliot’s Inferno—with Ash Wednesday beginning the Purgatorio—it is interesting that Ronald Bush, after a study of the textual sources, finds something of the Vita Nuova here: ‘Psychologically, the drama moves downward from resistance to submission, but spiritually it moves upward from proud isolation through humility to a thirst for divine love.’[11] This interpretation assumes, of course, that the eyes ‘I dare not meet in dreams’ are an echo of Dante’s Beatrice, spied but avoided because of shame across the lost Edenic waters in the Purgatorio.

[edit] Publication information

The poem was first published as now known on November 23, 1925, in Eliot's Poems: 1909-1925. Eliot was known to collect poems and fragments of poems to produce new works. This is clearest 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 I last saw in tears", "The wind sprang up at four o'clock", and "This is the dead land." The third poem became Parts 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[12])

[edit] Influence in culture

[edit] Literature

  • Stephen King's Dark Tower series contains countless references to The Hollow Men, as well as The Waste Land (most prominently the title of the 3rd book in the series, which is The Waste Lands). King also makes reference to this poem in Pet Sematary "Or maybe someone who had escaped from Eliot's poem about the hollow men. I should have been a pair of ragged claws."
  • The last line was used in the title of an anthology of short stories in which the world ends, Bangs and Whimpers.

[edit] Music

  • Eliot's poem was the inspiration for The Hollow Men, a piece for trumpet and orchestra by composer Vincent Persichetti.
  • The song "Hollow Again" by the Christian rock band Project 86 is based on this poem and the line "This is the way the world ends" is repeated many times.
  • The song "Longtime" by the band EMF samples T. S. Eliot's reading of this poem.
  • The song "The Shadow" by Devo (Total Devo, 1988) contains the lines, "Between the emotion/And the response/Falls the Shadow"
  • Sections of the poem are used in the song "The Straw" by musical group Idiot Flesh on their album "Fancy".
  • The song "The Chemicals Between Us" by Gavin Rossdale and his band, Bush (band) featured the line "we're of the Hollow Men, we are the naked ones"
  • The song "Thine is the Kingdom" by Greek metal band Rotting Christ contains Part III and Part V of the poem.
  • The song "Hollow Men" by Minneapolis post punk group Rifle Sport quotes extensively from the poem.
  • Jazz Saxophonist, Paul Desmond ("Take Five") parodied The Hollow Men in the following quote: Of Vogue fashion models, he said, "Sometimes they go around with guys who are scuffling -- for a while. But usually they end up marrying some cat with a factory. This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker."
  • The song "Hollow men" on the album "Doppleganger" by the group Daniel Amos in 1983
  • The song "Perineum Millennium" by Tim Minchin was heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot.
  • The song "No Homeowners" by Twin Cities hip hop artist Sims contains the lyric (rapped by fellow Doomtree member Dessa): 'It goes thanks, T.S., but the world ends like this / Not a bang, not a whimper, but a sibilant hiss.'
  • The song "Beast" by Riverside Lawn-based band Tusk takes all of its lyrics from Eliot's poem and ends with the line "Not with a bang, but with a whimper."
  • The song "Black Tower" from the Halo 3 soundtrack, when played backwards, has a paraphrased stanza from "The Hollow Men".

[edit] Film, television and gaming

  • Eliot's poem was also a strong influence on Francis Ford Coppola and the movie Apocalypse Now. In the film, antagonist Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) is depicted reading parts of the poem out loud to his followers. Furthermore, in the Complete Dossier DVD release of the film, there is a 17 minute special feature of Kurtz reciting the poem in its entirety. The poem's epigraph is "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" which is a quote from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, upon which the film is loosely based.
  • The BBC science-fiction programme Doctor Who references both the "Falls the Shadow" section (the words had also been used previously as the title of a Doctor Who novel) and the "This is the Way the World Ends…" conclusion in the 2007 episode The Lazarus Experiment.
  • The final stanza is printed one line at a time at the beginning of the Television production of Stephen King's The Stand. The poem is also referenced in part by the character who feels responsible for the deadly 'Captain Tripps' virus being unleashed.
  • Before the release of Halo: Combat Evolved, a series of emails were transmitted to a gaming website. The emails contained what would later be known as the Cortana Letters. In the first transmission, the letter makes reference to Eliot's last stanza when it states: "Oh, and your poet Eliot had it all wrong: THIS is the way the world ends." The cryptic message would be elaborated upon in the game's sequels, another appearance in promotional material for Halo 3, spoken by the character Cortana. The aforementioned scene was included in the final version of the game with Cortana speaking the line at a critical moment in the story when all hope seems lost. Also, the character Gravemind is heard speaking broken-up lines from this poem in the background at various points in Halo 3. Towards the end of the game, Sgt. Johnson states "Take me out with a bang" as he dies. The final section of the last level is titled "The Way the World Ends". Also, there are three reversed messages in the Halo 3 Soundtrack, each making reference to lines from the poem.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 2, near the end, the protagonist, Raiden, has a conversation with an A.I. construct about the saturation of information caused by the internet, and other modern communication advancements. The A.I. tells Raiden: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper."
  • The trailer for the 2007 film Southland Tales, directed by Richard Kelly, plays on the poem stating - "This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with a bang".
  • The Broadway play August: Osage County quotes passages from "The Hollow Men," stating "This is the way the world ends", and "Life is very long."

[edit] Art

  • Chris Marker created a 19 minute multimedia piece in 2005 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York titled "Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men" which was influenced by Eliot's poem.

[edit] Computers

  • The Acid1 test page for web browsers contains the phrase "the world ends" followed by two radio buttons labeled "bang" and "whimper" [13]

[edit] References

  1. ^ See, for instance, the biographically oriented work of one of Eliot's editors and major critics, Ronald Schuchard.
  2. ^ 'T. S. Eliot at Seventy, and an Interview with Eliot' in Saturday Review. Henry Hewes. 13 September 1958 in Grant p. 705
  3. ^ T. S. Eliot: the Critical Heritage. Michael Grant ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982
  4. ^ 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth.' Selected Essays T. S. Eliot (orig 1923)
  5. ^ A guide to The Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th edition ed. B. C. Southam.
  6. ^ ‘John Marston.’ Selected Essays T. S. Eliot (1934)
  7. ^ T. S. Eliot: A Life. Peter Ackroyd. NYC: Simon and Shuster, 1984. p. 147
  8. ^ Article in Grant
  9. ^ T. S. Eliot. Bernard Bergonzi. London: Macmillan, 1972
  10. ^ See entry in Grant
  11. ^ T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. Ronald Bush. (1983)
  12. ^ Gallup, Donald. T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended Edition) pp. 33, 210-11 (Harcourt Brace & World 1969)
  13. ^ display/box/float/clear test

[edit] External links