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The Hollow Men

"The Hollow Men" (1925) is a poem by the modernist writer T. S. Eliot. Like much of his work, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary, concerned with post–World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised: compare "Gerontion"), hopelessness, religious conversion, redemption and, some critics argue, his failing marriage with Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot.[2] It was published two years before Eliot converted to Anglicanism.[3]

For other uses, see The Hollow Men (disambiguation).

The Hollow Men

1925

England

English

Faber & Faber

1925

98

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.[1]

Divided into five parts, the poem is 98 lines long. Eliot's New York Times obituary in 1965 identified the final four as "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English".[4]

"Poème", published in the Winter 1924 edition of Commerce (with a French translation), became Part I of The Hollow Men.

[9]

Doris's Dream Songs in the November 1924 issue of Chapbook had the three poems: "Eyes that last I saw in tears", "The wind sprang up at four o'clock", and "This is the dead land." The third poem became Part III of The Hollow Men.

[9]

Three Eliot poems appeared in the January 1925 issue of his Criterion magazine: "Eyes I dare not meet in dreams", "Eyes that I last saw in tears", and "The eyes are not here". The first poem became Part II of The Hollow Men and the third became Part IV.

[9]

Additionally, the March 1925 of Dial published The Hollow Men, I-III which was finally transformed to The Hollow Men Parts I, II, and IV in Poems: 1909–1925.

[9]

The poem was first published as now known on 23 November 1925, in Eliot's Poems: 1909–1925.[9] Eliot was known to collect poems and fragments of poems to produce new works. This is clear to see in his poems The Hollow Men and "Ash-Wednesday" where he incorporated previously published poems to become sections of a larger work. In the case of The Hollow Men four of the five sections of the poem were previously published:

Eliot's poem was a strong influence on and the movie Apocalypse Now (1979), in which antagonist Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) is depicted reading parts of the poem aloud to his followers. Furthermore, the Complete Dossier DVD release of the film includes a 17-minute special feature of Kurtz reciting the poem in its entirety. The poem's epigraph, "Mistah Kurtz – he dead", is a quotation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), upon which the film is loosely based.

Francis Ford Coppola

The trailer for the film (2006), directed by Richard Kelly, references the poem, stating: "This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with a bang." The film also quotes this inverted version of the line a number of times, mostly in voice-overs.[11]

Southland Tales

Beverly Weston discusses the line "Life is very long" at the beginning of .

August: Osage County

Gunpowder Plot in popular culture

at Standard Ebooks

An omnibus collection of T. S. Eliot's poetry

Archived 22 July 2009 at the Wayback Machine

Text of the poem with notes

Scans of the 1925 publication of the poem, in a 1934 reprint