The “The Hollow Men” at 100

Eliot in 1926. Photography by Henry Ware Eliot.

“The Hollow Men,” as we have it now, was first published in T.S. Eliot’s Poems: 1909-1925. It is the final poem in the collection, appearing directly after The Waste Land.

To say it was first published in 1925 is a little misleading. The third section (of the five) appeared in the 1924 miscellany The Chapbook. It was part of a grouping of three lyrics under the title “Doris’s Dream Songs.” (Most of the contributors to The Chapbook are forgotten. Anna Wickham—who hung herself in 1947—had pride of place with four poems. It also included a drawing by Theo Scharf, who later served as a war artist in Hitler’s Germany.)

What became the first section of “The Hollow Men” was published next—in the Winter 1924/25 edition of the French literary magazine Commerce. Sections two and four were published in the January 1925 issue of Criterion. Then all three of these sections—that is, one, two, and four—were republished in the March 1925 Dial. Finally, sections one to four appeared with a fifth, which had never been published, in Poems in November.

I mention all of this because it reminds us that “The Hollow Men” is like a song—connected by motif rather than by a tight narrative. In fact, it is hard to “get” Eliot unless you understand how central music is to his work.

An illustration from Eliot’s “A Song for Simeon” (1928)

Eliot loved music—ragtime and vaudeville. He would go to musical hall shows regularly in Boston. He and his first wife, Vivienne, would roll the rug of their apartment back in the evening so they could put on a record and dance—at least early on in the marriage.

All of Eliot’s major poems have some connection to music. “Prufrock” is quite literally a “song.” The original title of The Waste Land was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” and many early critics compared the structure of the poem to the structure of jazz. Several years ago, Cynthia Haven collected a few articles on Eliot’s debt to Beethoven in The Four Quartets. The most intriguing was Katie Mitchell’s piece in The Guardian:

In 1994, on a dusty bookshelf at a friend's house, I stumbled across an old tape recording of Ted Hughes reading my favourite poem, TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. I was struck by the power of hearing the poem read aloud. When you read it to yourself silently, you can appreciate Eliot’s use of alliteration, or the way in which he cuts the cloth of his ideas in different metrical patterns - but the appreciation is cerebral. When you hear it spoken, the musical impact of the language, metres and rhymes crystallises the meaning and releases the emotion. The more I listened to Hughes' recording, the more I became convinced that the poem was written to be read out loud, and that hearing it made the material more accessible.

I began to wonder how you could make it into a live performance. With this in mind, I approached Stephen Dillane, one the few actors I knew who would not be daunted by the scale and potential loneliness of the undertaking. And so, three years ago, rehearsals began, fitted around our other work commitments.

It was only by chance that we discovered - in Lyndall Gordon’s book on Eliot's later career, Eliot's New Life - that the poem was inspired by one of Beethoven’s late string quartets. Once the initial connection had been made between the two pieces, I started to research them both, with a view to working out how to put them together. The idea of an evening that somehow combined a reading of the poem with a performance of the string quartet was born.

More:

Beethoven composed his string quartet, Opus 132 in A minor, in the winter of 1824-52. He was 54 and recovering from a serious bowel condition from which he had nearly died. As a result, he entitled the central movement “a song of thanksgiving ... offered to the divinity by a convalescent”, and the second section of this movement bears the inscription: “Feeling new strength.”

Over 100 years later, in March 1931, TS Eliot, aged 47, wrote to Stephen Spender: “I have the A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”

Eliot began the Four Quartets in 1935 and worked on it for years, finishing it in 1941. Whereas the composer wrote one quartet, with five movements, the poet wrote four pieces, each divided into five sections. Like Beethoven's work, Eliot’s poem was triggered by personal suffering, although not of a physical nature. It was probably connected to his separation from his wife, Vivienne, in 1932; her mental illness; and the rekindling of a platonic relationship with his first love, the American university teacher Emily Hale.

As Everett Gillis notes in his 1962 essay, “The Spiritual Status of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men,” both The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men” “follow a musical organization”:

Whereas the former is based on the familiar sonata arrangement of the later Four Quartets, The Hollow Men is a musical suite, consisting of choruses and recitatives. It opens with a chorus changed in unison by the hollow men, then continues in its three middle sections with recitative passages by the hollow-man spokesman, and ends in the last section with a combination of the two modes.

You likely recall the two modes in “The Hollow Men,” but if not, here it is in the final section of the poem with the chorus singing the italicized sections and the “spokesman” of the hollow men continuing his musings from earlier in the poem:

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

(Here is a recording of Eliot reading the poem.)

The question that has bedeviled critics—or at least it used to, when critics considered these kinds of questions—is how to take the attempt of the spokesman (and the chorus) to recite the Lord’s Prayer at the end of the poem.

Way back in 1958 in the PMLA, Friedrich W. Strothmann and Lawrence V. Ryan, drawing on the meaning of the word “empty” in St John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul (which Eliot knew), argued that the poem ends positively—which is to say, with a religious conversion:

The final version thus develops in the following manner. The hollow men, though they recognize that their life is meaningless, are afraid of the final crossing “With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom.” Not daring to meet the “eyes” of reality, they prefer at first to come “No nearer” to the divine light and to wear their “deliberate disguises.” In their present state of hesitation, they would remain in the spiritually sterile “cactus land.” But in this “hollow valley” there can be no hope unless they will empty themselves of everything that stands in the way of seeing the divine reality. Here the poem comes to climax and decision. Having acknowledged the facts, the speakers suddenly accept the consequences. It is, therefore, as “empty men” that that they dance around the prickly pear in the final section. Instead of lapsing into futility after momentarily recognizing the way out of the dilemma, the speakers have made a decision, and the poem concludes on a positive note. What was originally grasped by the “hollow men” as vague hope of finding the multifoliate rose changes for them into a way of realization: they are to achieve salvation by emptying themselves of all that is not God and journeying through the delectable desert of purgation.

In a 1962 article in Texas Studies in Literature and Language (TSLL), Daniel J. McConnell doesn’t see a conversion at the end of “The Hollow Men,” but he does find it ends on a positive note:

Eliot means to imply that only a return to the truths of Christianity will save a world crushed beneath the weight of its own sins, and that health and true vision will return to “sightless” only when “The eyes reappear / As the perpetual star / Multifoliate rose” . . . The Ressurrection is as certain as the morn, but first must come the Crucifixion, first must come the end of false hope, the false promise of History, and a return to moral choice. Eliot agrees with [Joseph] Conrad that London Bridge is truly “falling down,” but the old world must necessarily end with a “whimper” in order that the new world of Christian affirmation might be born. In this, Eliot implies, resides our only hope.

(It’s wild to think that these pieces were published in two of the top literary journals in America—journals that now publish stuff like: “Reimagining Community at the Open Marshland: Ecocritical Anti-Bildung in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” and “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject.”)

Eliot converted in 1927 shortly after the publication of “The Hollow Men,” and it is tempting to find evidence of that imminent conversion in the poem, but I don’t find these two readings convincing. Tonally, I don’t hear any evidence of the speaker(s) of the poem “suddenly” accepting that life without God is meaningless and turning to Christ in joy. If “The Hollow Men” is a kind of song, I would expect to hear such a change in a the final section, but, again, I don’t. What I hear is a continuation of the hollow men’s sense of failure—a sense of failure that is central to much of Eliot’s poetry before his conversion.

But it is a great poem, and it does certainly present us with a choice, as McConnell argues, between the “hollowness” of secularism and belief in God, even if the speakers of the poem find themselves incapable of confessing that belief, unlike Eliot only a few years later.

Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of T. S. Eliot (1938). The Royal Academy rejected this portrait when Lewis completed it. Lewis gave a short interview on its rejection, stating that it was not “unorthodox” though “it does not conform to the standards of atrocious silliness of the Royal Academy.”

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Lines from Eliot’s poems have appeared from time to time in pop music. The Pet Shop Boys’ 1986 hit “West End Girls” likely alludes to “The Hollow Men” with the line “Too many shadows, whispering voices.”

It has also influenced other works of art. In the 1980s, Robert Motherwell created a number of paintings (stand-alone and series) called The Hollow Men.

Robert Motherwell, The Hollow Men (1983)

Robert Motherwell, Hollow Men Suite #4 (1969)

Robert Motherwell, Hollow Men Series (1989)

Chris Marker’s 2005 installation Owls at Noon includes lines and commentary from Marker on Eliot’s poem. Giulia Cenci’s series of skeletal structures of doglike humanoids starring at their hands as if they held phones—called “The Hollow Men”—is currently on view at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

In a 1999 essay on Eliot for The New Criterion, Roger Kimball wrote that “Eliot was obsessed with reality”:

That is the ultimate source of his power as a poet and his authority as a critic. He was everywhere engaged in a battle against ersatz: ersatz culture, ersatz religion, ersatz humanity. That, finally, is what makes even the late, religious Eliot congenial to modernism: his impatience with imposture.

We certainly see this obsession with reality in “The Hollow Men” and Eliot’s impatience with what Kimball calls “ersatz humanity” and “ersatz religion.”