T.S. Eliot

## Biography

Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM, was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the 20th century's major poets".

He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25. He eventually became a British subject, renouncing his American passport.

He was well educated; attended Harvard University.

The Great War was the most important historical event of Thomas Eliot’s young adult life. It was a formative event in his intellectual outlook.

Eliot never joined the army and never experienced combat first-hand, but he had to deal with numerous tragic consequences of the war (pl closed to him died in battle or suffered from PTSD after the war)

He found solace in the Anglican Church after his wife’s emotional and physical health deteriorated.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for lit.

He wrote poetry, prose, drama and essays.  Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925). He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949).

He died in London in 1965.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### World War I (1914-1918)

The first World War was an international conflict that pitted **the Central Powers** ( Germany, Austria- Hungary, and Turkey) against **the Allies** (France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, and The USA) caused mainly by unresolved territorial disputes, growth of nationalism, and technological and industrial developments used to increase nations’ military build-up. It left behind a landscape of death and destruction that had never been seen before. Both sides in WWI paid tremendous price in terms of human life. About 8.5 million soldiers died as a result of the war, another 21 million were wounded, and the war led to the death of countless civilians by way of starvation, disease, and slaughter. All in all, an entire generation of europeans wiped out.

The war had a devastating economic impact on Europe. The great conflict drained the treasuries of European countries. One account put the total cost of the war at $338 billion.

The Great War destroyed acres of farmland, as well as homes, villages and towns. The enormous suffering that resulted from the Great War left a deep mark on Western society as well. A sense of disillusionment settled over the survivors. The insecurity and despair that people experienced were reflected in the arts and literature of the time. Many people also feared the future and expressed doubts about traditional and religious beliefs. Therefore, **some writers and thinkers expressed their anxieties by creating disturbing visions of the present and the future.**

World War I had a great impact on countries, removed dynasties and crafted a new post-war Europe. The map of Europe was radically redrawn; borders were redefined and new countries formed, carved from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Some ethnic and nationalist groups, which had long dreamed of self-government, were finally given the opportunity.

The treaties to end WWI were forged after great debate and compromise, and while they sought to bring a new sense of security and peace to the world, they prompted mainly anger and resentment. The Treaty of Versailles by Germany and the Allied powers was signed in 1919. The treaty created the League of Nations (the league was to be an international association whose goal would be to keep peace among nations) and punished Germany. The defeated Nation lost substantial territory and had severe restrictions placed on its military operations. The war guilt clause placed sole responsibility for the war on Germany’s shoulder. As a result, Germany had to pay reparations to the Allies.

The horrors of WWI shuttered the enlightenment belief that progress could continued and reason would prevailed. In the postwar period people began questioning traditional beliefs. Some found answers in new scientific developments, which challenged the way people looked at the world. **Unconventional styles and ideas in literature, philosophy and music reflected the uncertain time.**

## Definition

A **wide range** of experimental and avant-garde trends in literature and the arts in a variety of evolving forms, which dominated the European and American cultural landscape from the late 19th century to the 1950s.

## Background

### Historical Events

* World War I (1914-1918)
* Inventions and technological developments (photography, telephone, cars, electricity, planes, moving pictures)
* Suffragettes' movement (1928)
* Spread of literacy
* Ireland:
	+ Anglo-Irish Guerrilla War (1919-1921)
	+ Irish Free State (1922)
	+ Irish Civil War (1922-1923)
	+ Republic of Ireland (1937)
* Depression and unemployment: (1929 Wall Street Crash)
* Rise of Totalitarianisms (Franco, Mussolini, Hitler)
* World War II

### Influences

Important intellectual precursors who questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving the human self.

* **Charles Darwin** (1809 – 1882) On the *Origin of the Species* (1859) uprooted the traditional view of “man made in the image and likeness of God,” replacing it with one of man as the descendant of an ape.
* **Karl Marx** (1818 – 1883) *Capital: Critique of Political Economy* (1867): his view of the economic determinism that governed western history and culture directly challenged the idealist philosophy of its time.
* **Friedrich Nietzsche** (1844-1900): his declaration of “the death of God” (end of the 19th c.) summarized the dismissal of the very ground of the Hebraic/Christian tradition
* **James G. Frazer** (1854-1941): his *The Golden Bough* (1915) stressed the correspondence between central Christian tenets and pagan, often barbaric, myths and rituals.
* **Sigmund Freud** (1856-1939) his theory of the unconscious (beginnings of 20th c.) called into question the notion of rational free choice
* **Albert Einstein** (1879 – 1955) Theory of Relativity (beginnings of 20th c.): his discoveries changed the way we view space and time, and showed us that time is relative to an observer. He found that space and time were interwoven into a single continuum known as space-time; that means that events that occur at the same time for one observer could occur at different times for another.

Critics have decided that these thinkers prepared the society that was to come. (Mussetta)

## Features

* Rejection of 19th-century traditions
* Celebration of cosmopolitan lifestyle
* Challenge to the norms of the dominant burgeois culture
* Purpose: to shock and disturb the sensibilities of the conventional audience by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles
* Problematization of the very idea of art and its tradition
* Determination to dispense with the past
* Profound sense of intellectual crisis and social alienation
* Concept of truth as fleeting, impermanent, intensely personal moment that the artist could strive to capture
* Exaltation of difficulty and elitism
* Belief in the crisis of twentieth-century civilization: the world's fall into chaos, decadence, or other dismal, yet dramatically exciting, straits
* Reliance on the discontent, the dispersed, the fragmented, the dislocated
* Reflection on the revolutionary character of modern life: its speed, confusion, and reckless, sensational moods
* Violation of the accepted conventions and properties, not only of art but of social discourse, to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and to introduce hitherto neglected, and sometimes forbidden, taboo subject matter
* Expression of a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories
* Tendency towards ironic modes
* Preference for the aesthetically radical and symbolic, containing striking technical innovation

## Modernism in Literature

Modernist writers doubt the essential validity of reality as the term understood by realists and naturalists. For them, "the real is not so much the external incident in the life of the character as the internal mental processes that develop in reaction to this incident." (Heiney and Downs 86) Some movements within the visual arts influenced Modernist literature:

* Impressionism: tried to portray the psychological impressions these objects and events make on characters, emphasizing the role of individual perception and exploring the nature of the conscious and unconscious mind.
* Surrealism: tried to liberate the subconscious, to see connectionss overlooked by the logical mind, to deny the supreme authority of rationality and so portray objects and events as they seem rather than as they are.
* Expressionism: tried to express the inner vision, the inner emotion, or the inner spiritual reality that seem more important than the external realitites of objects and events.

### Modernist Fiction

* Rejection of the accepted continuity of chronological development (non linear plots).
* Attempt of new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS styles.
* Departure from the standard ways of representing characters.
* Fostering of techniques of juxtaposition and multiple points of view, challenging the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms.

### Modernist Poetry

* Rejection of traditional METER in favour of FREE VERSE
* Replacement of the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions.
* Tendency to replace the standard syntactic flow of poetic language by fragmented utterances.
* Substitution of the traditional coherence of poetic structure by deliberate dislocation of parts, in which very diverse components are related by connections that are left to the reader to discover, or invent.
* Rejection of the diction of the Georgian poets (taking inspiration from the countryside and nature, and respecting traditional generic conventions) in favor of a newly harsh and strange expression.

## Bibliography

* “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)
* “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)
* “The Waste Land” (1922)
* “The Hollow Men” (1925)
* “Ash Wednesday” (1930)
* Four Quartets (set of poems)
* *Murder in the Cathedral* (verse drama)
* *The Cocktail Party* (Play)

## The Hollow Men

### Title

Eliot claimed to have made up the title from combining **The Hollow Land**, the title of a romance by William Morris with Kipling's title, **The Broken Men**.

It presents us with the first of many allusions, directly referencing two of the four main sources for this poem, **Shakespeare's Julius Caesar**, and **Conrad's *Heart of Darkness***  (The other sources are the **Gunpowder Plot** and **Dante's *The Divine Comedy***, both of which also deal with men or shadows of men who may be described as hollow at the core.

### The Introductory Epigraphs

The poem begins with two epigraphs. They set the tone for the poem.

*Mistah Kurtz –he dead.*

This is a quotation of the death of the doomed character Kurtz. In his novel, Conrad portrays the empty nature of men. Mister Kurtz, an European slave trader who had travelled to Africa in order to go on with his business, is a character who lacks a soul, who is a depraved man, and thus, a true `Hollow Man.´ He is mainly morally empty living only for ivory and the money and power that it brings. The `phonetic´ spelling of `Mister´, which changes into Mistah and the ellipsis of the verb `to be´ in ‘he dead’ proves that the speaker is probably some kind of non-native English speaker, a slave, who may represent another kind of `hollow man´ -a passive, humble, and submissive  soul.

*A penny for the Old Guy.*

The other is an expression used by English schoolchildren who want money to buy fireworks to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day in England’s November 5th. On this holiday, people burn straw effigies of Fawkes, who tried to blow up the British Parliament back in the 17th century. They were mainly English Catholics who resented King James I and his reign's treatment of their religion. The plan didn’t work bc one of the conspirators, gave the plan away when he wrote to his brother-in-law, a Member of Parliament, telling him to stay away from the Houses of Parliament. Guy Fawkes was arrested in the cellars of the House of Lords, standing guard over two tons of gunpowder. He was tortured until he revealed the names of his co-conspirators. In this verse Old and Guy are written with capital letters, emphasising the fact that the puppet represents a `poor, old, mortal fellow´ who needs to be given a few alms - food or money given to poor people. This epigraph seems to make reference to such monstrous men who at last believed in what they were doing, however horrific the results, setting up a natural contrast to the hollowness of modern man, who fundamentally believes in nothing and is, therefore, empty at the core of his being. So, two different types of `hollow/stuffed men´ are presented: he who lacks a soul (Mister Kurtz) and he who lacks a real body (Guy Fawkes), representing both physical and spiritual emptiness.

TONE: lonely, fearful and melancholic tone.

THEMES: Emptiness, disillusionment, instability, dissatisfaction, passivity, lack of identity.

Failure - Failure is a major theme in "The Hollow Men." Eliot collects examples of failure in the figures of Kurtz and Fawkes, who both failed at living an anarchic life. He also explores it under other subthemes: paralysis, or a failure of will; impotence, or a failure to procreate; malaise, or a failure of imagination; and amorality, or a failure of faith. The poem ends with the world ending, another failure, and it ends poorly, in the embarrassing sound of a whimper.

Faith - Faith is explored in "The Hollow Men" through contrasts. First, there’s the contrast between the Hollow Men themselves, who are paralyzed by amorality, and those who have crossed the river into the afterlife with “direct eyes,” representing faith and moral clarity. Then, there’s a contrast between the arid desert, the “dead land” of faithlessness, and the dream state in sleep, where the narrator has access to a distant, fading world of faith, represented by the figures of the wind singing, the tree swinging, and the fading star. The poem intensifies with expressions of religious desire, and a simultaneous opposing resurgence of despair. Prayers are directed to a broken stone; the vision of the Christian “perpetual star, Multifoliate rose” becomes “The hope only/Of empty men.” The final word, whimper, describes a sound, expressing the paradox of praying for salvation without enough faith to form a word. Their meaningless survival is naturally expected to have a paltry (= insignificant) exclusion. There is no celebration of life’s triumphed obstacles, no satisfaction of a life well spent; it is only an inconsequential whimper.  THM are a group of emotionally and spiritually sterile figures who inhabit an arid land and avoid the “Eyes” of souls that dwell in Heaven. Their feeble wish to gain access to “death’s twilight kingdom” is in vain as they are doomed to perish between life and death. As such, they look forward to a termination that is ignominious and insignificant.

Living transformed to mere survival - It is through the depiction of the Hollow Men’s miserable existence that Eliot poignantly advocates the riveting truth that modern life post World War 1 scenario wasn’t living in the truest sense, but commonplace compromise with fragmented beliefs and ideals. Consequently, the Hollow Men inhabit an arid land (dead land), where nothing grows except cacti. They are neither audible (dried voices, whisper) nor can they say anything with reason (Are quiet and meaningless).

Man’s crippled state - There are numerous depressing key traits of modern man that Eliot exposes through the groaning of the choric speakers such as:

* The Hollow Men’s faintheartedness in not daring to confront the “Eyes” not having the strength to stand alone (Leaning together)
* His apathy in remaining content with wearing “Such deliberate disguises/Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves”.
* His sexual incapacity (Lips that would kiss/Form prayers to broken stone)
* His dominant indecisiveness due to the all-pervading “shadow”.
* Finally, his resignation that prepares him to face a pathetic end.

One last hope of resurrection - Even knowing that there’s hardly any escape, the Hollow Men desperately hope that “The eyes reappear/As the perpetual star” and offer them access to “death’s twilight kingdom”. Thus Eliot perhaps had a fleeting hope of the salvation of modern man.

FORM: It is written in **free verse**

It’s a **non-metrical work** (it doesn’t follow any particular metrical pattern or rhyme scheme).

It consists on five sections with stanzas of an unequal lenght.

### Symbols

* **Dryness** = lack of life
* **Scarecrows** = symbols of hollowness, lack of body.
* **Death’s dream kingdom** = Heaven. The Hollow Men afraid name it. They are curious about what "death's dream kingdom" is like, but they also fear the "eyes" of heavenly souls and the final judgmental that God will deliver. Fading or dying stars symbolize the receding chance for hope and salvation from Heaven.
* **Eyes** = eyes of heavenly souls of the "death's dream kingdom," which are their only hope for salvation. The eyes see the Hollow Men for the empty creatures they really are. = signs of truth, and hope of salvation.
* **Shadow** = darkness.
* **Dead Land** =  the post-war world
* **Broken Items** = the fragmented spiritual condition of the Hollow Men

## Intro Paragraph

Written by one of the 20th century major modernist poets and Nobel prize T. S Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (1925) is considered representative of Modernism. Contextualized by World War I and the resulting social uncertainty and disillusionment, Modernism presented avant-garde trends in literature and the arts based on questioning the certainties that traditional modes of social organization supported. Likewise, modernist poetry was characterized by a rejection of traditional forms and expression of thoughts, adopting more complex and difficult forms and style in order to deeply reflect on the hopeless perceptions of  modern society. “The Hollow Men”, a free verse poem about the empty and corrupted modern men, excels in representing modernist poetry as it reflects on the contemporary alienation and dilemma through a master use of literary devices and techniques, such as allusion, fragmentation, and symbolism.

### MLA citation

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “The Hollow Men”. Harvard University. 1988. Web