The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot could not be any truer with the messages of modern society. Reading Hollow Men, the average person can find almost all of the messages applying to modern day times. Especially in a high school setting. It was obvious that Eliot was far ahead of his time when he nailed society on the head about its imperfections. Three messages that Eliot portrays in The Hollow Men are: the self-identity crisis, the loss of faith, and the incredible force of skepticism. In which line
The imagery depicted in T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" evokes a sense of desolate hopelessness and lends to Eliot's generally cynical view of civilization during this period in history. A reaction of deep and profound disappointment in mankind around him is made evident in this stark work, first published in 1925. In this short piece, Eliot enumerates several deep faults he finds in his fellowman, including hypocrisy, apathy and indifference, and leaves the reader with a feeling of
The two passages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” contain a lot of similar and contrasting ideas. The darkness controlling thoughts and actions of the people in the Congo parallels the shadow of fear and inevitable death that hangs over the Hollow men. The Hollow men’s fallacious gods has them trapped in a death without a white light at the end of the tunnel. Kurtz's ruthlessness from his passion for materialistic things and power consumes him with hopeless
the backbone of modernist poetry, who wrote mostly about darkness, despair, and depression in life. He tried and succeeded to capture the torment of the world during World War 1 and World War II (Shmoop "T.S. Eliot"). Eliot’s view of the human condition is evident in “The Hollow Men” through the issues of fear, despair, and depression. The poem starts out with a couplet. The first line talks about a man who is dead. In the second line it talks about giving a penny to an old guy. Why does Eliot
to T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men, as straw men are mentioned. At the sight of the fearsome tanks and the gruesome way that they roll over the dead, wounded and alive soldiers, the soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front “shrivel up in [their] thin skin before [the tanks]...[their] arms are sticks of straw” (Remarque 283); a similar reference to straw soldiers can be found in T.S. Eliot's poem titled The Hollow Men as the narrator describes himself and his companions as the “hollow men/...the
and methods to convey particular messages, positioning readers to take on the views of the author. The poem “The Hollow Men” by T.S Eliot addresses the failures of human courage and faith and his modernist style like most poets after him is an extremely expressive one, one with much of his poetry reflecting his own attitudes and beliefs about the importance of religious faith. Eliot’s manipulation of various literary conventions invites the readers to adopt his own attitudes and beliefs towards matters
thereby providing a new dimension to them. It is a Janus-faced ideology in the sense that it is partly a continuation and partly repudiation from Modernism. Thomas Stearns Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” is assembled from fragments which exhibit the hollow nature of the present generation human beings. Published in 1925, “The Hollow Men” is considered one of the popular Modernist poems of Eliot. This paper focuses on the Postmodernist features, like intertextuality, allusion, parody, juxtaposition, fragmentation
Darkness, Hollow Men, and Apocalypse Now In today's literary world there are many different texts that have interlocking literary meaning through their references to one another and to other works. I am going to compare and draw similarities between T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. These three sources have many different references to one another in different ways. In T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, he begins
In T.S Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” the speaker illustrates the loss of identity and the absence of substance within the hollow men due to the depletion of faith in religion following World War I. Initially, the speaker reveals that following what was known as “the war to end all wars,” the men who had fought are now void of true substance and are only a shell of their prior selves. Specifically, the speaker describes the voices of the hollow men to be as “quiet and meaningless / as wind in dry
waiting to be judged. Without the fearlessness and faith to move on to the afterlife, they will spend eternity stuck in purgatory. When T. S. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men,” he used symbolism, imagery, and repetition to share his insight to address the lack of courage and faith that plagues every human being. T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” is a dramatic monologue, free verse poem that consists of five parts that could be considered five separate poems. His use of “allegorically abstract text nevertheless