The Hollow Men
T.S. Eliot
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars
4.29
· 14 ratings · 13 pages · Published: 1925
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
'The Hollow Men' is a poem by T. S. Eliot written in 1925, divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines. Eliot's New York Times obituary in 1965 identified the final four as "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English".
The poem follows the otherworldly journey of the spiritually dead. These "hollow men" are broken, lost souls. They fail to transform their motions into actions, conception to creation, desire to fulfillment. They did not put any good or evil into the world, so they cannot move on into the afterlife.
T.S. Elliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic, and editor. Born in 1888 in St. Louis (MO, USA), he is considered one of the 20th century's major poets, and a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry."In ten years' time," wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (1931), "Elliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English." In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Price "for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry."
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