Discussing Heart Of Darkness, The Hollow Men, and Apocalypse Now

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Relationship between Heart Of Darkness, The Hollow Men, and Apocalypse Now

The Hollow Men is a poem by T.S. Eliot who won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for all his great accomplishments. The Hollow Men is about the hollowness that all people have; while Heart of Darkness is a story of the darkness that all people have. The poem written by Eliot was greatly influenced by Conrad and Dante. Some people may even think that WWI also influenced it. It was written after World War I and could be describing how people's beliefs had been eroded. I think that a lot of the poem is written about Heart Of Darkness, and Dante's Inferno is used as imagery for the poem. In this essay I will show how the poem The Hollow Men is talking about the same thing as the Heart Of Darkness, how lines from the Hollow Men are describing scenes from Heart Of Darkness, and why Brando quoted the poem in the movie Apocalypse Now.

The poem The Hallow Men is talking obviously talking about hollowness in men. In the book Heart Of Darkness there hollow men. B.C. Southam says that: "Conrad's story is full of hollow men-empty of faith, of personality, of moral strength, of humanity"(A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot 151). This is especially observed in Kurtz. He can be described as 'hollow at the core' and the whole story revolves around this hollowness. In Eliot's poem when he is talking about hollow men he is talking a...

... middle of paper ...

...he same feeling of the hollow man. They both know that every man has a darkness. Eliot went so far as to use actual scenes from the book and incorporate them into his poem. The movie Apocalypse Now uses the Poem to show the Darkness that Eliot has described so well. The book, the poem, and the movie are all great in their own way. There seems to be something great about darkness.

Works Cited

Southam, B.C. A Student's Guide to The Selected Poem of T.S. Eliot. 1963: Boston, Faber and Faber Limited. 1990

Hargrove, Nancy. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot. Mississippi UP, 1978.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart Of Darkness. 1899. Norton & Company (1988): New York: Norton, 1988

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