The Hollow Men Analysis

Inherited money is held in much higher esteem than earned money in Savannah, Georgia. This is a theme seen throughout Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt's non-fictional account of life in Savannah. Characters such as Jim Williams, who worked for their money and brought themselves up the social ladder, are seen as being beneath those who inherited their money, such as Lee Adler. The old wealth tend to look down on anyone who wasn't born with their money. Their views of just about everything, including laws and punishments, differ depending on whether the person in question is of wealth due to blood or sweat.

Another famous and influential work from T.S. Eliot is The Hollow Men. Likely influenced by World War I, T. S. Eliot portrays a disconnect from humanity and a disillusionment with typical beliefs as a source of human despair in The Hollow Men. The “hollow men” that the work is centered around are depicted devoid of any human qualities that might provide them a relief from despair, such as hope or faith. As is written in “T. S. Eliot's Indigenous Critical Concepts and 'The Hollow Men'” by Muhammad Khan Sangi and others, “In this poem the human beings have been shown devoid of the qualities of faith, moral strength, of personality, determination and that of humanity; they are like empty bodies, lacking all human virtues” (Sangi et al para 4). No matter how these qualities were lost to the individuals, the result is constant and predictable: the individuals feel an inescapable despair. When one has nothing to anticipate in life, no expectations or hopes, then life loses its meaning. This is the world that the hollow men live in perpetually. The entire work, as Sangi describes, “is a cry of despair unrelieved by hope. The peculiarity of the poem is that it is an inner drama with the utmost economy of words. The images echo the deadness of sensibility and the emptiness of hollow men who, like the effigies, are fit only for burning” (Sangi et al para 5). Again, the hollow men are depicted as worthless, insofar as they are compared to effigies, the only purpose of which is to be

By looking through a critical lens at T Stearns Eliot’s poetry in light of his 20th century, modernist context, much is revealed about his personal and the rapidly evolving societal beliefs of that era. Through his repeating motif of time and fragmentation throughout his poems, Eliot reveals the prevalent feelings of isolation while in society along with the need to hide one’s feelings and emotions in this degrading society. His exploration of the use of ambiguity and stream of consciousness by Eliot, which is a characteristic of modernist artists, allows his work to resound over decades while being interpreted and differently understood by every audience that encounters them.

Poetry can sometimes allow one to explore the unknown. However, in some works of poetry, one can realise that some known ideas or values remain relevant to current society. This is certainly applicable to T.S. Eliot’s poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Eliot’s manipulation of poetic techniques in both these poems allows the responder to realise that some ideas prevail in both modern and post-modern society. These poems explore the unknown phenomena of the obscurity regarding the purpose and meaning of life. This unknown phenomena causes the persona in both texts to resort to a sense of isolation or alienation. Eliot uses poetic techniques such as metaphors and personification to convey his ideas.

“The Devils Language” by Marilyn Dumont and “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot are quite similar. They both critique their culture in the ways they see it. Nothing Is missing from each authors poem because it is critiquing the world as they have seen and learned from different experiences in their lives. Marilyn Dumont writes about “The great white way” (pg365, line 4) or white culture and the way that aboriginal culture is snuffed out or looked down upon. T.S. Eliot writes about people being too cowardly to be good or bad and also what happens after we die. Therefore, Marilyn Dumont and T.S. Eliot’s works are similar in the way that they see the wrongs in their cultures.

John Berendt’s novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil follows a New York native reporter as he investigates in Savannah. The story tells us, the readers, how the people living in Savannah deal with a murder case between a well-known man and a well-known hustler. The book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil shows the reader the various speakers, the impersonal tone, and the occasion of the trial.

Being empty of “something” should be considered as being full of everything in the world. One can see the trees, rain, clouds and even the whole universe in a single sheet of paper though it is “empty.” Emptiness is the foundation of everything.

Eliot is not solely criticising modern life in the poem, it also serves as a reflection of Eliot’s social context and his own life, a product of its time.

The Hollow Men describe their whispers as "quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass" (7-8); this is also partially true about the entire monologue. This poem is often associated with Eliot 's most famous poem, “The Waste Land,” because both works are set in Hellish environments and concern people whose lives are fragmented and incoherent, written around the same period in Eliot 's life. Compared to “The Waste Land,” this poem reads much quieter and drier. In “The Hollow Men,” the short length of the words and phrases from the Men creates frequent pauses, as if each line were an ghostly gust of wind, changing directions to later return to the same place. The poem would be considered free verse because no meter, rhythm, or rhyme scheme is apparent. Eliot does not use a strict meter such as iambic penta- or tetrameter, which he uses in many of his other poems. “The Hollow Men” is similar to a dramatic monologue by the collective group of Hollow Men, but the verses are not consistent like a traditional monologue. The five sections in the poem also vary in total length and stanza length. The lines throughout all five sections are short, causing the speech to be staccato, as if the Men run out of breath before getting a complete thought out.

The end of The Hollow Men can only be the beginning of a deep and long reflection for thoughtful readers. T.S. Eliot, who always believed that in his end is his beginning, died and left his verse full of hidden messages to be understood, and codes to be deciphered. It is this complexity, which is at the heart of modernism as a literary movement, that makes of Eliot’s poetry very typically modernist. As Ezra Pound once famously stated, Eliot truly did “modernize himself”. Although his poetry was subject to important transformations over the course of his

T.S. Eliot in the twentieth-century wrote what is today widely-regarded as one of the most important text of modernist poems, “The Waste Land.” This poem evaluates many aspects of ancient and contemporary culture and customs, and how the contemporary culture has degraded into a wasteland. In “The Waste Land,” Eliot conjures, through allusions to multiple religions and works of literature in five separate sections, a fragmented and seemingly disjointed poem. Eliot repeatedly alludes to western and eastern cultural foundation blocks to illustrate the cultural degradation prevalent in the modern era of England. One specific eastern example is brought up in the third section of the poem, which T.S. Eliot names “Fire Sermon,” an allusion to

Q5 "Much of what Eliot writes about is harsh and bleak, but he writes about it in a way that is often beautiful". Comment fully on both parts of this assertion.

In T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem The Wasteland, a bleak picture of post-war London civilization is illuminated. The inhabitants of Eliot’s wasteland are living in a morally bankrupt and spiritually lost society. Through fragmented narration, Eliot recalls tales of lost love, misplaced lust, forgone spirituality, fruitless pilgrimages, and the “living dead”- those who shuffle through life without a care. These tales are the personal attempts of each person to fulfill the desires which plague them, though none ever stop to consider that what they want may not be what they need, nor do they consider why it is they feel they must do these things. Through studies in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective

“The Wasteland,” written by American-born British poet T.S. Eliot, is an epic poem that characterizes the Modernist movement. The poem captures the gloomy mindset of post-WWI society and profoundly guides the savage destruction of the Great War. “The Wasteland” was Eliot’s masterpiece and went on to become one of the most influential poems of the 20th century. It exemplifies many of his specific techniques and is well-known because of its inventive poetic form. In the poem, Eliot skillfully utilizes form, symbolism, and diction to depict the horrors of war’s aftermath, signify the death of Western culture, and convey the dreary worldwide view of the Modernist movement.

All words, phrases and sentences (or just simply images) which make up this poem seem to, in Levi-Strauss’ words, “be a valeur symbolique zero [and the signifier] can take on any value required ”, meaning that the images Eliot uses do not have one fixed signification and consequently conjure up thought-provoking ideas that need to be studied (qtd. in