What are some of the Literary Allusions in "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot?

Question

There are apparently literary allusions ranging from Shakespeare to Dante in here

http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~evans/hollow.html

Answer 1

Here are some:

"Salvation. This is what the "Hollow Men" seek. Rising from the memory of Dante's Divine Comedy, "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot draws us back into the world he created in The Waste Land, this time to examine the nature of enervation as it seeks salvation. The Hollow Men, like Conrad's Mr. Kurtz from Heart of Darkness and England's national villain Guy Fawkes, are men of high ideals but without moral fortitude. Their passionate quest for the Holy Grail of noble idealism has blinded them to the origin of the question itself and they have sacrificed their morality for the sake of idealism. Now they seek salvation.

Eliot's poem follows loosely and returns often to The Divine Comedy. Using Dante's kingdoms of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise as a guide, Eliot has shaped a poem which can be seen as a continuation of The Waste Land, which was written just prior to this. He has also used epigraphic references to The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 (whose defeat is celebrated on Guy Fawkes day) and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to frame the poem, giving added coherence and structure to an otherwise elusive poem. Eliot has sent his reader on a hunt through literary history, just as he did in The Waste Land, but this time the works alluded to are less vital to understanding the poem. They endow the reader with a deeper understanding of Mr. Eliot's vision but in the end, the poem stands by itself, a work of its own.

Some critics regard Mr. Eliot's poem as nothing more than an exercise in allusion. During my research of this poem, I waded through some authors who referenced nearly every line to an outside work. They entangled Mr. Eliot's poem in so much tedious literary allusion that it seemed not a poem but a convention of classics. Eliot seemed not a poet but a "referencer." Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of literary allusion in this poem, just as there is in most of Mr. Eliot's work, but the allusions do not change the meaning of the poem; they merely aid in the understanding of it. Nonetheless, in order to grasp the full meaning of Eliot's poem we should first have a basic understanding of the works he referenced.

The epigraph "A Penny for the Old Guy" refers to the November 5th celebration of Guy Fawkes Day. The day commemorates the foiling of a mass assassination plot against the king and his ministers. A group of extremist Catholics planned to usurp the king by blowing up the Houses of Parliament on November 5, 1605, the State Opening of Parliament. But one of the terrorists inadvertently exposed the plot by warning his brother-in-law, a member of Parliament, to avoid the State Opening. On the night of November 4th, Guy Fawkes was apprehended in the cellar below the House of Lords standing guard over nearly two tons of gunpowder. After being tortured for days, he was subsequently executed.

The second epigraph, "Mistah Kurtz - He dead," refers to the enigmatic character of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This is the story of the English seaman Marlow, who was sent into deepest Africa to find the once admired, now feared renegade ivory trader Kurtz. As Marlow travels down the Congo he begins to recognize similarities between Kurtz and himself. When he finally encounters Kurtz at his trading station, he finds a "hollow sham" of a man (Conrad 109). Sick with malaria and verging on insanity, Kurtz makes Marlow the keeper of his memory. Kurtz, using idealism to rationalize murder and other such heinous crimes, is the prototypical "hollow" man.

"The Hollow Men" was originally composed as several different poems, which the poet gradually came to think of as sequenced. Part 1, "We are the Hollow Men," was originally published in the winter of 1924. Part III, "This is the dead land," was published as the third part of 'Doris's Dream Songs" in November 1924. Parts 1, 11, and IV were published together for the first time in March 1925. The whole poem, with Part V, the final addition, appeared in "Poems 1909-1925" later that same year. The separate composition of each individual part, then marrying them to form one, could be the explanation for the poem's lack of identifiable narrative sequence (Scofield, 137). Eliot himself recognized this. As late as October 1925, a month before the poem's publication, Eliot still had doubts about the poem. He wrote to his editor, "Is it too bad to print? If not, can anything be done to it? Can it be cleaned up in any way? I feel I want something of about this length (I-V) to end the volume ("Poems 1909-1925") as post Waste" (Southam, 202).

It should also be noted that while Eliot did not actually convert from staunch atheism to Christianity until 1926, he began frequently visiting churches as early as 1921 (Gordon, 211). This would indicate that the author was dealing with his own inner conflict over salvation during the period in which he wrote this poem. Knowing this helps illuminate the poem, especially Part V, when the exhausted "Hollow Men" try to recite The Lord's Prayer. Another indicator of Eliot's spiritual struggle is the line "broken jaw of our lost kingdoms." This is likely an allusion to the weapon with which Samson slew the Philistines and signifies that the salvation theme in this poem is not simply a product of following The Divine Comedy.

A full, line-by-line annotation of Mr. Eliot's poem is painfully tedious and, I believe, robs the poem of its intended final effect. The reader feels an overall mood of disgust laced with pity for these men, who, upon realizing their imminent damnation, make one final lunge at salvation. But the impetus of their effort is not a thirst after salvation for salvation's sake, but rather a fear of damnation. However, a general understanding of some of the more important allusions and the progression of the poem lends a great deal to the enjoyment of this masterpiece.

The short lines establish a sense of breathlessness and exhaustion, while at the same time reminding the reader of some muttered incantation. "The Hollow Men" themselves bring to mind the crowd of the "uncommitted" on the banks of the River Acheron in Canto III of Dante's Inferno, who have not yet "crossed/ ... to death's other Kingdom" (hell itself, in Inferno) and who are "gathered on the beach of this tumid river." The "multifoliate rose"of Part IV is a vivid connection to Dante's vision of heaven in the form of a Rose in Paradise, because of the tiers of "petals" as the ranks of the redeemed (Canto XXX, line 112, Canto XXXI, line 1). Eliot's "kingdoms" seem to bear some resemblance to Dante's traditional Catholic division of the afterlife into Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, but any attempt to find exact equivalents is strained at best (Scofield 144).

"Headpiece" in the first stanza, in the singular, suggests the hollow men's uniformity. The 'Paralysed force, gesture with out motion" describes the paradoxical effect of the whole poem, which consists both of a sense of exhaustion and of a last concentrated burst of weak energy in the hope of salvation. In lines 52-56 we are shown a glimpse of "the hollow valley," a part of "death's dream kingdom." This scene brings to mind several other valleys. First and foremost is another allusion to Heart of Darkness where Marlow describes a valley as "step[ing] into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair" (Conrad, 23).

There are various other allusions to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, The Bible, and other works by the author. But none of these is crucial to appreciation of this poem. T. S. Eliot himself was a critic and had a much stricter definition of "literary tradition" than did most of his contemporaries. This poem is a model of the use of "literary tradition" to make an entirely new landscape as the stage of an ancient conflict."


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Answer 4

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