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The general point of view may be described as classicist
in literature, a royalist in politics, and
Did T.S. Eliot have a sense of humor? I don't know; but, I sure as heck hope so. Because as we reach its end, the greatest poet of the 20th Century seems destined to be remembered as the guy who wrote Cats. His banishment from the canon was probably inevitable, what with being a white male Christian and the whiff of anti-Semitism wafting from him, but if he ever had a chance to cling to his spot on the basis of his early classics like The Wasteland and Prufrock, works like The Hollow Men pretty much guaranteed he would be consigned to oblivion. For this poem, while not as coherent an attack on Modern values or lack of said, as the writings of someone like C.S. Lewis, is certainly one of the most eloquent. THE HOLLOW MEN (1927) Mistah Kurtz-he dead.
I We are the hollow men
Shape without form, shade without color,
Those who have crossed
II Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
Let me be no nearer
Not that final meeting
III This is the dead land
Is it like this
IV The eyes are not here
In this last of meeting places
V Here we go 'round the prickly pear
Between the idea
For Thine is the Kingdom
Life is very long Between the desire
For Thine is the Kingdom
This is the way the world ends
I wouldn't pretend to understand all of this, nor exactly what it is he's trying to say, but I do know what it says to me. I take it as an indictment of Modern man and the failure of confidence that characterizes us. The epigraph about Mr. Kurtz, from Conrad's Heart of Darkness (see Review), seems to harken back longingly for even such monstrous men who at least believed in what they were doing, however horrific the results. It sets 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, like a Guy Fawkes dummy. Two other powerful images really appeal to me. The comparison of the sound of modern voices to "rat's feet over broken glass" aptly dismisses all of the psycho babble and faux spirituality of the age, all of modernity's futile effort to replace the beliefs that have been discarded. And, of course, the great lines, "This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper" remind me of an argument that I used to enjoy during the Cold War when such melodramatics seemed more appropriate; that it would be better to just juke it out with the USSR, just let the missiles fly, than to gradually succumb to Communist domination. Of course, this seems like the product of unbalanced minds now that we've triumphed, but think back to things like Dr. Strangelove and you get a feel for the tenor of the confrontation between absolutists and appeasers. I for one preferred the bang to the whimper. This is a powerful poem that rewards repeated readings, revealing different interpretations and images with each successive return. (Reviewed:) Grade: (B+) Tweet Websites:-WIKIPEDIA: T. S. Eliot -ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA : Eliot, T. S. -Academy of American Poets: T. S. Eliot -Nobel Laureates: Thomas Stearns Eliot -Literature Online: Addison-Wesley's Literature Online--A site to support Kennedy & Gioia's Literature, 7th Edition. -T. S. Eliot Poems -Literary Research Guide: T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965) -T.S. Eliot (Most Web) -FEATURED AUTHOR: NY Times Book Review -OBIT : T.S. Eliot, the Poet, is Dead in London at 76 (Tuesday, January 5, 1965, NY Times) -LINKS: American Modernism -ETEXT: The Hollow Men -ETEXT: Annotated - -POEM: Today’s Poem: Gerontion (Joseph Bottum, Sep 27, 2024, Poems Ancient & Modern) -ESSAY: Faith With Feeling: Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: It contains both the drama and the architecture of belief necessary for a full poetic experience. (James Matthew Wilson, September 25, 2024, Modern Age) -ESSAY: What T.S. Eliot’s Letters to Emily Hale Reveal About the Poet’s Romantic Past: Sara Fitzgerald on Unrequited Love and a Recently Declassified Epistolary Correspondence (Sara Fitzgerald, September 6, 2024, Lit Hub) -ESSAY: The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T.S. Eliot (Clint Brand|July 8th, 2024, Imaginative Conservative) -ESSAY: T.S. Eliot on Economics and Education (Richard Gunderman, EconLib) -ESSAY: Reinhold Niebuhr, T. S. Eliot, and The Year of Our Lord 1943 (John Shelton, May 29, 2024, Providence) -ESSAY: Our Greatest Pilgrim Poet?: Not since the great Metaphysical Poets of the Elizabethan Age has there been such a flowering of creative genius as seen in the verse of just one 20th century poet, T.S. Eliot. (Regis Martin, 5/25/24, Crisis) -ESSAY: Permanent Things: T.S. Eliot’s Conservatism (Benjamin Lockerd, January 3rd, 2024, Imaginative Conservative) -ESSAY: THE UNFAMILIAR NAME: T.S. ELIOT ON HERCULES AND THE PENTECOST (Mateusz Stró?y?ski, May 2024, Antigone) -ESSAY: Fear, Dust, and Water: A Look Into T.S. Eliot’s Poetic Imagery (Raymond Dokupil. 1/15/22, Voegelin View) -AUDIO LECTURE: A Guide to Finally Understanding T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (Audio Lecture) (Andy patton, November 2023, Rabbit Room) -ESSAY: T. S. Eliot’s still point: On the poet’s life & work. (James Matthew Wilson, April 2023, New Criterion) -ESSAY: Eliot’s Pitiless Brilliance: ‘The Waste Land’ (William H. Pritchard, March 1, 2023, Commonweal) -ESSAY: T.S. Eliot: fame, frustration and love (Jeffrey Meyers, 2/12/23, The Article) -ESSAY: Thumbscrew and wailing wall: T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (Jeffrey Meyers, 1/29/23, The Article) -ESSAY: That’s Not Typing, It’s Writing: How T. S. Eliot Wrote “The Waste Land”: “With me an unfinished thing is a thing that might as well be rubbed out.” (Matthew Hollis, January 9, 2023, LitHub) -ESSAY: T.S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor (Sir Roger Scruton, January 3rd, 2023, Imaginative Conservative) -ESSAY: The Waste Land at 100 (James Matthew Wilson, 12/14/22, University Bookman) -SUMMARY: The Waste Land in a Nutshell (JOSEPH PEARCE, 8/26/22, Crisis) -ESSAY: The alienation of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ at 100, has come to feel like home: The December birthday ‘The Waste Land’ shares with Christmas foreshadows the Easter that is to come. (Karen Swallow Prior, 12/13/22, RNS) -ESSAY: Remembering T. S. Eliot (Micah Mattix|Apr. 1st, 2024, Chronicles) -ESSAY: T.S. ELIOT AT 101 (Cynthia Ozick, November 12, 1989, The New Yorker) - -ESSAY: On St. Louis’s T.S. Eliot and the Arrogance of a Poet’s Love (Ben, JANUARY 15, 2023, The Common Reader) -ESSAY: TS Eliot’s women: the unsung female voices of The Waste Land (Jude Rogers, 10/31/22, The Observer) -ESSAY: How T.S. Eliot’s Therapeutic Practice Produced The Waste Land: David Barnes on a Poet, His Doctor, and the Making of a Literary Masterpiece (David Barnes, October 24, 2022, LitHub) -ESSAY: How The Waste Land became the most quotable book of the last 100 years: With its many places, ages and languages, The Waste Land disturbed the piped music of modernity (Jeremy Noel-Tod, October 6, 2022, Prospect) -PODCAST: The Waste Land (The History of Literature Podcas) - - -ESSAY: Help from Uncle Possum: Unpublished letters from T. S. Eliot about Omar Pound’s schooldays (Chris Jones, September 2022, TLS) -ESSAY: A People Without History: T.S. Eliot’s Critique of Evolutionary History (Benjamin Lockerd|August 21st, 2022, Imaginative Conservative) -ESSAY: T. S. Eliot and the Holy Grail: The Nobel Laureate drew on a centuries-old legend when he put the Fisher King in The Waste Land (Angelica Frey June 1, 2022, JSTOR Daily) -FOREWARD: to TS Eliot’s The Wasteland and Other Poems, 100th anniversary edition (Qiu Xiaolong, Asian Review of Books) -ESSAY: Bob Dylan’s and T.S. Eliot’s search for truth: Eliot lingered in Dylan’s consciousness as he sought to answer the question “what is it?” (francesca Peacock, April 28, 2022, Spectator) -ESSAY: 100 years since poetry changed for ever with ‘The Waste Land’: T.S. Eliot began his career as a nihilist and ended it as a Christian. (Michael Cook, Jan 19, 2022, MercatorNet) -ESSAY: Eliot and the Follies of the Time (Russell Kirk, 08/01/08, First Principles) -LECTURE: The Politics of T.S. Eliot (Russell Kirk, The Heritage Foundation) -ARTICLE : T.S. Eliot took pause when writing of cats (ARTHUR HIRSCH, Baltimore Sun) -ESSAY: T.S. Eliot's Political 'Middle Way' (Michael R. Stevens, Religion & Liberty) -ESSAY: A craving for reality: T. S. Eliot today (Roger Kimball, The New Criterion) -ESSAY: TS Eliot's Hollow Men (AMANDA J. WAGGONER) -ESSAY: What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed (J. Bottum, First Things) -ESSAY : T. S. Eliot's Political "Middle Way" (Michael R. Stevens, Acton Institute) Nudge-Winking: a review of The 'Criterion': Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain by Jason Harding (Terry Eagleton, 19 September 2002, London Review of Books) -ESSAY: Pun and Games: A New Approach to Five Early Poems by T. S. Eliot (Professor Patricia Sloane, New York City Technical College of The City University of New York) -ESSAY: T.S. Eliot: Poet and Critic as Historical Theorist (Scott Weidner) -ESSAY: Was T.S. Eliot a Scoundrel? Although the poet's anti-Semitism is beyond dispute, its centrality to his work is open to question (John Gross, Commentary) -ESSAY : Shell Game: Clawing away at Eliot (Rick Perlstein, Lingua Franca, September 1997) -ESSAY : The Bones in Mr. Eliot's Closet : Rediscovering the patron saint of all the flawed and haunted seekers of modernity. (Michael R. Stevens, Books & Culture) -ESSAY : The Two Eliots : "To all appearances," a biographer writes, "Eliot was conventional, mild, decorous, yet the hidden character was daring and savage." (Jewel Spears Brooker, Books & Culture) -ONLINE STUDY GUIDE : Eliot's Poetry by T. S. Eliot (Spark Note, Melissa Martin) -ESSAY : Words alone : Denis Donoghue explains the genesis of his forthcoming book on T.S. Eliot (Irish Times) -ESSAY: T. S. ELIOT, CRIME FICTION CRITIC: Thoughts on Crime Writing From The Man Who Rescued Willkie Collins from Obscurity (CURTIS EVANS, 4/29/19, Crime Reads) -ESSAY: Beastly Clues T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword: Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove language and rewove it anew. Roddy Howland Jackson reveals the pleasures and imaginative creatures lurking in Torquemada's lively grids. (Roddy Howland Jackson, January 12, 2022, Public Domain Review) - -REVIEW : of Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot. By Denis Donoghue (Frank Kermode, Irish Times) -REVIEW : of Words Alone : The Poetry of T. S. Eliot by Denis Donoghue (Adam Kirsch, NY Times Book Review) -REVIEW : of WORDS ALONE: THE POET T.S. ELIOT. By Denis Donoghue (The Economist) -REVIEW: Louis Menand: How Eliot Became Eliot, NY Review of Books Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T.S. Eliot and edited by Christopher Ricks The Waste Land, the 75th anniversary edition by T.S. Eliot -REVIEW: of T. S. ELIOT: A Study in Character and Style By Ronald Bush (Michiko Kakutani, NY Times) -REVIEW: of ELIOT'S NEW LIFE By Lyndall Gordon (Denis Donoghue, NY Times Book Review) -REVIEW: of T. S. ELIOT. A Life By Peter Ackroyd (John Gross, NY Times) -REVIEW: of T. S. ELIOT A Life By Peter Ackroyd (A. Walton Litz, NY Times Book Review) -REVIEW: T. S. ELIOT, ANTI-SEMITISM AND LITERARY FORM By Anthony Julius (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY Times) -REVIEW: of Louis Menand: Eliot and the Jews, NY Review of Books T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form by Anthony Julius -REVIEW: The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume I, 1898-1922 Edited by Valerie Eliot (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY Times) -REVIEW: of THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT Volume I, 1898-1922 Edited by Valerie Eliot (Hugh Kenner, NY Times Book Review) -REVIEW: of The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot (Joseph Epstein, WSJ) -REVIEW: of THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT : Volume 9: 1939–1941: Eeyore reports for duty: The ‘devoted patience’ of T. S. Eliot, wartime correspondent (Seamus Perry, TLS) -REVIEW: of Robert Crawford’s Eliot: After The Waste Land (Erica Wagner, New Statesman) -REVIEW: of Eliot After “The Waste Land” by Robert Crawford (Anthony Domestico, The Baffler) -REVIEW: of Eliot after The Waste Land (Michael Thurston, The hudson Review) -REVIEW: of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis (Alex Clark, The Guardian) -REVIEW: of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, by Matthew Hollis (Edward Short, City Journal) -REVIEW: of Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Nathaniel Rosenthalis, Common Reader) -REVIEW: of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition : 8-Volume Set Edited by Ronald Schuchard et al. (Ben Lockerd, University Bookman) -REVIEW: of The Hyacinth Girl by Lyndall Gordon (Paul Krause, Voegelin View) -REVIEW: of T. S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy by James Matthew Wilson (Daniel James Sundahl, University Bookman) FILM: -FILMOGRAPHY: Four Quartets 2023 (Metacritic) Book-related and General Links: -AUDIO: “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot: Poems read aloud, beautifully (Amanda Holmes | February 7, 2023, American Scholar) - GENERAL:
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