Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

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The Hollow Men: 1925 The Hollow Men represents a significant departure from the other poems. This is a dark, hostile poem depicting an apocalyptic world of “straw men” where truth, love, faith and substance are all absent; a form of hell on earth. The first line of the poem is a reference to Conrad’s novel, the Heart of Darkness. ‘Mistah Kurtz’ is a character from the Heart of Darkness, who was described as “hollow to the core” who was “ruthless in his gluttonous pursuit of ivory in the Congo”. (Benson, 1967, p. 10) The Hollow Men focuses on a male protagonist who is disjointed and lost, who contemplates how people are going to evaluate his life. He is in the ‘twilight kingdom’ between life and death. The description of the ‘tumid river’ alludes to Dante Alighieri’s poem ‘Dante’s inferno’, which is about the struggle after death to pass through purgatory, where dead men plead for redemption, as in The Hollow Men where the narrator is in hope of passing through the ‘dead land’ and the ‘cactus land’. The poem almost appears a delirium as it re-writes the childhood nursery rhyme of the fruitful mulberry bush, replacing it with a desert ‘prickly pear’. It is also a condemnation of inaction, and it makes comment that ‘not to act’ is as bad as committing morally wrong actions. The connection to the paralysis of Prufrock is clear in this. Eliot uses juxtaposition to highlight differences between conception and creation, emotion and response, desire and spasm, essence and the loss of it, and between potency, power, and existence. In other words, he emphasises the failure to translate an idea into action. The fifth section mirrors the Lord’s Prayer, making it more an act of dying as the shadow of death, and this is emphasised by the repetition used. It makes it appear as though the person is trying to recite the Lord’s Prayer but he lapses into incoherence and then unconsciousness. He thought that life was very long, but only now he comprehends that it is quickly ending. The final stanza addresses that for all our hopes and dreams, life does not come to a triumphant end but rather with ‘a whimper’, and one merely fades away. Through modern literary techniques, Eliot highlights how modernity has made society religiously and spiritually arid. He suggests that modernity has merely reduced life to ‘a whimper’ due to the rejection of religious values that brought meaning to individual’s lives.