"The horror... the horror..."

I respect T.S. Eliot’s work because of his complex allusions and his dedication to the artistry of poetry.

I love T.S. Eliot’s work because of his evocative imagery and his definitive representation of one example of a post-World War I mentality.

Like his work or not, Eliot is arguably the representative modernist poet.  To this day we fight over who has more of a claim to his work, America or England. If I remember correctly the Oxford libraries and bookstores shelved his materials with the British authors, while here in America he is always included as part of the American canon.  I tend to view Eliot as an American who was more influenced by European culture than his own.  Eliot certainly makes few allusions to American literature, favoring instead classical mythology and the English Renaissance.

On a first reading The Hollow Men (1925) is deceptively simple.  Our anthology has only five footnotes – take that The Waste Land (1922)!  In fact, three of these footnotes are direct references to British culture (four if you think of the significance of Christianity throughout Britain’s history).  The other is, you guessed it, a reference to Dante.  As I skimmed through the selections on the Modern American Poetry website I found mentions of more allusions to Dante, Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar, James Frazer, Rudyard Kipling, Aristotle, and Plato.  In general though, Eliot’s point of reference is limited and resides in English culture, particularly seen in his multiple references to Joseph Conrad, Guy Fawkes, and Christianity.

There is a duality at the core the poem, seen clearly by the frequent occurrence of contradictory images and images of progression:

“Shape without form, shade without colour,           

Paralysed force, gesture without motion” (lines 11-12).

“to death’s other Kingdom” (line 14, emphasis mine).

And everything in lines 72-89.

Maybe I missed the obvious, but I never noticed the conflicting images in the first two lines until my most recent reading of the poem.  I always assumed that hollow and stuffed must be synonymous descriptors, but in reality they are actually antithetical. Something must be hollow before it can be stuffed, but you cannot physically be both.  Maybe Eliot is speaking of an emotional or spiritual hollowness and a physical stuffing.  Either way, I notice that lines 65-67 again address the issues of emptiness, “Of death’s twilight kingdom / The hope only / Of Empty men.”  Whatever hope this other kingdom could bring, it is hope that can only be found in an empty man, not the stuffed man Eliot introduces in his second line.

Maybe there are two different types of men in the poem, the hollow and the stuffed, but there are definitely distinct worlds or kingdoms.  I know some critics read a complex system of kingdoms in the poem, but I read it as being only two distinct places, the merits of both the speaker is contemplating.  The one he lives in is not satisfying, but he is terrified of the unknown.  In order to avoid “that final meeting / In the twilight kingdom” (37-38) the speaker stays in his current kingdom seeking contentment with idols in a place where “Here the stone images / are raised, here they receive / The supplication of a dead man’s hand / Under the twinkle of a fading star” (42-44).  I tend to identify these kingdoms as (1) life as we know it here on earth, and (2) the possibility of a life after death, and in light of the references to Dante and the Bible a specifically Christian understanding. 

In line 14 death is said to own both kingdoms, which does not take away but rather gives credibility to this identification.  Death is the necessary means of transportation from this life to the next (hence death’s role in this second kingdom).  Likewise, a post-WWI view of the earthly kingdom is logically going to be described in light of death, especially concerning culture’s inability to sustain meaning (a theme already addressed in Eliot’s other works).  This second view of death also makes sense in light of the references to Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, a story about the darkness of human nature.  I find it interesting that Eliot uses Conrad’s book to suggest a post-WWI mentality and 50 years later Francis Ford Coppola uses both of these sources in reference to Vietnam in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now.

Perhaps one way to look at this conflict between kingdoms is in the final section of the poem.  In the midst of an explosive combination of children’s songs and images of progression, competing interjections are found.  On one hand we have a part of the Lord’s Prayer “For Thine is the Kingdom” (77) and on the other hand we have “Life is very long” (84), a reference to Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands and implying an unwanted lengthening of life.  These lines come together in 91-94, but the lines are fragmented and unfinished, culminating in the famous “This is the way the world ends…” It’s as if the speaker cannot fully embrace either kingdom, because the Shadow falls between them.  Here is a question to contemplate: what do you think this Shadow could be?