Abstract
Seeking a responsible reading of The Waste Land is aided by attending to its relation to “The Hollow Men,” published as a whole three years later. Here, too, tonal shifts are frequent and critical. The later poem continues much of the earlier (Guy Fawkes, for example, representing aborted efforts that “The Hollow Men” also emphasizes in the way “the Shadow” “comes between” various efforts). “The Hollow Men” does, however, veer from The Waste Land in proposing the necessity of facing “the eyes” capable of revealing the darkness of the human heart.
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Notes
T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1930).
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 33.
T.S. Eliot, Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925).
Hugh Kenner, T.S. Eliot: The Invisible Poet (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 194.
B.C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 261.
Qtd. in ibid.
Qtd. ibid., 201.
Ibid.
T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 287.
Southam, Guide to the Selected Poems, 215.
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood, 48.
Ibid., 50–51.
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© 2013 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2013). “He Do the [Poet] in Different Voices”: Eyes, You, and I in “The Hollow Men”. In: T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364692_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364692_3
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