The Hollow Men (1925) is a major poem by T. S. Eliot, the Nobel-Prize-winning modernist poet. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognised to be concerned most 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 own failed marriage (Vivienne Eliot may have been having an...
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The Hollow Men (1925) is a major poem by T. S. Eliot, the Nobel-Prize-winning modernist poet. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognised to be concerned most 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 own failed marriage (Vivienne Eliot may have been having an affair with Bertrand Russell).
Eliot wrote that he produced the title "The Hollow Men" by combining the titles of the romance "The Hollow Land" by William Morris with the poem "The Broken Men" by Rudyard Kipling: but it is possible that this is one of Eliot's many constructed allusions, and that the title originates more transparently from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or from the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness who is referred to as a "hollow sham" and "hollow at the core".
The two epigraphs to the poem, "Mistah Kurtz - he...
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