T. S. Eliot was a man who strongly believed that poetry should represent life. He knew that life was complex, so that is why his poetry was difficult to understand not only for students writing research papers, but also for critics. He was 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 address that Mistah Kurtz is dead? Who is he? Mistah Kurtz was a character in the story Heart of Darkness. He was a trader who used idealism to justify various crimes. This would make him like a Hollow Man (Abdul Sattar Gopang, Muhammad Khan Sangi, and Abdul Fattah Soomro 2). And why does the old guy need a penny? The “old guy needs a penny” refers to Guy Fawkes Day. This day stands for the discovery of a plan created by Guy Fawkes to blow up the king with two tons of gunpowder. He was captured and killed. From then on, people have burned statues of Guy Fawkes filled with straw. This man is used by Eliot as a symbol to show that modern men are empty, just like the straw effigies (Abdul Sattar Gopang, Muhammad Khan Sangi, and Abdul Fattah Soomro 1). The poem continues into the first stanza where there is a group of Hollow Men leaning together. What do the Hollow Men represent? The Hollow Men represent a human like being with the absence of anything that makes life worth living (Abdul Sattar Gopang, ...
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Works Cited
Gopang, Abdul Sattar, Muhammad Khan Sangi, and Abdul Fattah Soomro. "T. S. Eliot's Indigenous Critical Concepts and 'The Hollow Men.'" Language In India Apr. 2012: 473+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.
Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun. "Eliot Shadows: Autography and Style in the Hollow Men." Yeats Eliot Review 24.4 (2007): 12+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.
Morace, Robert A. “The Hollow Men.” Masterplots II. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Vol. 3. Pasadena: Salem, 1992. 948-950. Print.
Shmoop Editorial Team. "The Hollow Men Analysis." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.
Shmoop Editorial Team. "T.S. Eliot." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
Shmoop Editorial Team. "T.S. Eliot: Biography."Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
Magill, Frank N. ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series. Vol 5 Pru-Ter. California: Salem Press, Inc. 1986.
One of the most important elements in Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground is Wright’s careful use of sensory descriptions, imagery, and light to depict Fred Daniels’ experiences both above and below ground. Wright’s uses these depictions of Fred Daniels underground world to create incomplete pictures of the experiences he has and of the people he encounters. These half-images fuel the idea that The Man Who Lived Underground is a dark and twisted allusion to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Pasadena: Salem Press, 1989. 575-578. Stewart, Larry L. Masterplots II: Short Story Series. Ed. Frank N. Magill.
The characters of The Sun Also Rises have difficulty coping with the changing world just as the Hollow Men cannot deal with change in the situation they face. The narrator of The Hollow Men end the poem on a depressing note, “This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper” (840 THM). Through his description of the world’s end with a whimper, the narrator presents a metaphor for his life which he feels is insignificant. With this he shows his thought of inability to face his issue, showing a feeling of incompetence which is very much how the characters of The Sun Also Rises feel. For instance, Jake has an encounter with a waiter in France, but finds a simple solution, “Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money” (237 SAR). Here, Ja...
“The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot is a poem of struggle for meaning amongst the meaningless. T.S. Eliot shows the reader how in this day and age society is becoming less and less active and beginning to become more careless in the way in which we live and behave, as represented throughout the poem. It brings out all of our worlds weaknesses and flaws. Eliot brings out the fact that the human race is disintegrating. We are compared to as hollow men with no emotions, cares, and nothing inside. Hollow men all look different in some way, but inside we are all the same. We shift in whatever direction we are being blown in. In The Hollow Men, by T.S. Eliot examines the absence of spiritual guidance, lack of communication between individuals, and absence of direction of outstanding and pro founding leadership.
Many people in the world who are unhappy with their lives can connect with the emptiness the hollow men feel in Eliot’s poem. “We are the stuffed men leaning together headpiece filled with straw” indicates an unoriginal quality that all the men share. Their goals in life are alike because they are not fulfilling. In “The Hollow Men,” the image of scarecrows represent people’s empty lives and their vacant pursuits. The hollow men’s lives have no point or meaning.
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
(T.S. Eliot Quotes.) TS Eliot was not only a poet, but a poet that wanted to change his world. He was writing in the hopes that it would give his society a reality check that would encourage them to change themselves and make their lives more worthwhile. Through his themes of alienation, isolation, and giving an example of a decaying society, TS Eliot wanted to change his society.
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 achieves a remarkable unity of effect in terms of voice, mood and imagery” (Morace 948). Before the poem starts, there are two epigraphs; “Mistah Kurtz – he dead. / A penny for the Old Guy” (lines 1-2). Eliot alludes to these two epigraphs because their themes are developed throughout his poem. “The first epigraph is from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” a story …that examines the hollowness and horror of lack of faith, spiritual paralysis, and despair” (Bloom 61), just like the “hollow men” in his poem. The second epigraph “refers to the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day in Britain” (Bloom 61). This is a day that celebrates Fawkes’ unsuccessful rebellion against King James I with his capture in the cellar of the Parliament building, where stored gun powder was supposed to blow up and kill King James I and his family. Once captured, he cowardly turned over his co-conspirators and they all were killed. It is “celebrated with bonfires, fireworks, the burning of scarecrows,
Eliot's Themes of Death and Futility in the Poem Remind Your Self of The Hollow Men. One of the major themes explored by Eliot in the Hollow Men is that of death and the futility of life. Eliot portrays life, war, royalty, religion and. death as futile in the poem.
The early poetry of T. S. Eliot, poems such as "The Wasteland" or "The Love Song
T.S. Eliot and Yulisa Amadu Maddy both address the topics of fear of death and then correlative love of life, but from entirely different points of view. T.S. Eliot wrote during a time when people were questioning relativity, especially moral relativity and it's effect on life after death. Maddy wrote about young boys who were going through that time in a teenager's life when they realize that they will die someday. Thus, teenagers begin to acknowledge death while embarking on their search for love and the meaning of life.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
A. The "Waste Land" - "The Waste Land" Masterplots, 4th ed. Salem, IL - 2010 -. Literary Reference Center. Web.
Even though many critics have analyzed Hughes’s works both individually, by the volume and as a whole, not every individual piece has had the extent analysis by a professional critic. There are so many works that Hughes’s has created so it left a lot of options for those who want to analyze his poems themselves. The analysis of Ted Hughes’s poems reveals the deeper meaning and thought about the death of innocence and the idea that life is a game that can end in victory or defeat. Hughes creates these ideas with the use of animal imagery, extensive rigid and dark word choice and anthropomorphism in his poems “Crow’s fall," “Crow’s Nerve Fails” and “Crow Blacker Than Ever”.