The Hollow Men :: Hollow Men Essays

The Hollow Men   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 masters degree the next year.  later on a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, he re dour to Harvard.  Further admit led him to Merton College, Oxford, and he decided to stay in England. He worked get-go as a teacher and then in Lloyds Bank until 1925.  wherefore he joined the London publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, becoming film director when the firm became Faber and Faber in 1929.  Eliot won the Nobel prize for literature in 1948 and separate major literary awards.             Eliot saw an exhausted poetic mode organism employed, that contained no verbal excitement or original craftsmanship, by the Georgian poets who were active when he settled in London.  He sought to father poetry more than subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more precise.  He acquire the necessity of clear and precise public figures, and he learned too, to fear romantic softness and to regard the poetic medium preferably than the poets personality as the important factor.  Eliot saw in the French symbolists how image could be both absolutely precise in what it referred to physic entirelyy and at the same time endlessly suggestive in the meanings it set up because of its relationship to other images.  Eliots real novelty was his deliberate elimination of all merely connective and transitional passages, his building up of the total prescript 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 excerpt from Joseph Conrads novel the Heart of Darkness.  The line Mistah Kurtz-he dead refers to a Mr. Kurtz who was a European trader who had g unmatchable in the the heart of darkness by travelling into the central African jungle, with European standards of life and conduct.  Because he has no honorable or spiritual strength to sustain him, he was soon turned into a barbarian.  He differs, however, from Eliots 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.