Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri of New England
descent, on Sept. 26, 1888. He entered Harvard University in 1906, completed
his courses in three years and earned a master's degree the next year. After a
year at the Sorbonne in Paris, he returned to Harvard. Further study led him to
Merton College, Oxford, and he decided to stay in England. He worked first as a
teacher and then in Lloyd's Bank until 1925. Then he joined the London
publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, becoming director when the firm became Faber
and Faber in 1929. Eliot won the Nobel prize for literature in 1948 and other
major literary awards.
Eliot saw an exhausted poetic mode being employed, that contained no
verbal excitement or original craftsmanship, by the Georgian poets who were
active when he settled in London. He sought to make poetry more subtle, more
suggestive, and at the same time more precise. He learned the necessity of
clear and precise images, and he learned too, to fear romantic softness and to
regard the poetic medium rather than the poet's personality as the important
factor. Eliot saw in the French symbolists how image could be both absolutely
precise in what it referred to physically and at the same time endlessly
suggestive in the meanings it set up because of its relationship to other images.
Eliot's real novelty was his deliberate elimination of all merely connective
and transitional passages, his building up of the total pattern of meaning
through the immediate comparison of images without overt explanation of what
they are doing, together with his use of indirect references to other works of
literature (some at times quite obscure).
Eliot starts his poem "The Hollow Men" with a quote from Joseph Conrad's
novel the Heart of Darkness. The line "Mistah Kurtz-he dead" refers to a Mr.
Kurtz who was a European trader who had gone in the "the heart of darkness" by
traveling into the central African jungle, with European standards of life and
conduct. Because he has no moral or spiritual strength to sustain him, he was
soon turned into a barbarian. He differs, however, from Eliot's "hollow men" as
he is not paralyzed as they are , but on his death catches a glimpse of the
nature of his actions when he claims "The horror! the Horror!" Kurtz is thus
one of the "lost /Violent souls" mentioned in lines 15-16. Eliot next continues
with "A penny for the Old Guy". This is a reference to the cry of English
children soliciting money for fireworks to commemorate Guy Fawkes day, November
5; which commemorates the "gunpowder plot" of 1605 in which Guy Fawkes and other
conspirators planned to blow up both houses of Parliament. On this day, which
commemorates the failure of the explosion, the likes of Fawkes are burned in
effigy and mock explosions using fireworks are produced. The relation of this
custom to the poem suggests another inference: as the children make a game of
make believe out of Guy Fawkes , so do we make a game out of religion.
The first lines bring the title and theme into a critical relationship.
We are like the "Old Guy", effigies stuffed with straw. It may also be noticed
that the first and last part of the poem indicate a church service, and the
ritual service throughout. This is indicated in the passages "Leaning
together...whisper together", and the voices "...