Modernism

• The turn of the twentieth century witnessed many changes in

Western societies and Western thought.
• The germs of this change started in the last decades of the nineteenth
century, with some criticism of romantic sensibility and the
assumptions of enlightenment.
• The many wars and upheavals that Europe experienced in the second
half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the most bloody war of
the second decade of twentieth century, World War I, made a
mockery of all the notion of Romanticism: such as the sublime, beauty
of nature, subjective experience and so forth.
• It also made a mockery of the traditional conservative mood of the
Victorian era with its philosophical positivism and rigid morality, and
self confident claim of the moral high ground.
• It showed the limitation of realism, with its belief in Christian morality
and accurate representation of external reality, for this was achieved
at the expense of internal reality and inner feelings.
• This led to the emergence of Modernism in literature and art.
• Modernism is seen to have dominated Western literature and art
from 1890s – 1950s
T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965)
• Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888–January 4, 1965) was an
American / British poet, playwright, and literary critic.
• But his most important contribution is his contribution to poetry, he is
generally regarded as the most important English-language poet of
the 20th century.
• Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, for a well to do family from New
England.
• He was the youngest of six children, his parents were both 44 when
he was born, and his oldest sister was 19, and the youngest brother 8,
so he did not have the company of children when he was young.
• He was named, Thomas (Tom) Stearns, after his maternal grandfather,
with the Eliot added of his father.
• In 1898, after his primary school, he studied, Latin, Greek, French and
German in Smith Academy in St Louis, until 1905.
• He started writing poetry while studying there, and fell, particularly at
the age of 14, under the spell of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of
Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam. This translation has become an
important poetic text of its own right, and not merely a translation.
• In 1905, he attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a
preparatory year to enrol at Harvard.
• In 1906 he went to Harvard to study philosophy and completed his
degree there in three years, instead of four, graduating in 1909.
• In 1908, while still a student at Harvard, he read a book that changed
his life and introduced him to a different type of poetry, the poetry of
the French symbolists: Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Jules
Laforgue, this was Arthur Symon’s book, The Symbolist Movement in
Poetry (1899).
 “The Hollow Men”
• Mistah Kurtz-he dead
            A penny for the Old Guy

                       I

    We are the hollow men

    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats' feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
  
    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
  
    Those who have crossed
    With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
    Remember us-if at all-not as lost
    Violent souls, but only
    As the hollow men
    The stuffed men.
• II

    Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

    In death's dream kingdom
    These do not appear:
    There, the eyes are
    Sunlight on a broken column
    There, is a tree swinging
    And voices are
    In the wind's singing
    More distant and more solemn
    Than a fading star.
  
    Let me be no nearer
    In death's dream kingdom
    Let me also wear
    Such deliberate disguises
    Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
    In a field
    Behaving as the wind behaves
    No nearer-
  
    Not that final meeting
    In the twilight kingdom
• III

    This is the dead land

    This is cactus land
    Here the stone images
    Are raised, here they receive
    The supplication of a dead man's hand
    Under the twinkle of a fading star.
  
    Is it like this
    In death's other kingdom
    Waking alone
    At the hour when we are
    Trembling with tenderness
    Lips that would kiss
    Form prayers to broken stone.
• IV

    The eyes are not here

    There are no eyes here
    In this valley of dying stars
    In this hollow valley
    This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
  
    In this last of meeting places
    We grope together
    And avoid speech
    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
  
    Sightless, unless
    The eyes reappear
    As the perpetual star
    Multifoliate rose
    Of death's twilight kingdom
    The hope only
    Of empty men.

  
           
•      V

    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.
 Analysis
• First Epigraph
• Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

• The first epigraph is a quote from a servant in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
• The servant reveals to the character Marlow that another character named Kurtz has
just died.
• Kurtz is a British ivory trader in Africa, and is one of the many Europeans who arrived
to exploit that continent's resources in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He seems to
have some qualities of greatness because he collects more ivory than other traders,
but in one memorable passage, Marlow suspects Kurtz of being "hollow to the core"
and lacking a human and moral nature. The epigraph tells us that, in some sense, the
poem is set after the death of Kurtz, or someone "hollow" man like him.
• Second Epigraph
• A penny for the Old Guy

• The English celebrate Guy Fawkes Day every November 5th with
fireworks and the burning of little straw men or "effigies."
• Guy Fawkes was convicted of trying to blow up King James I in 1605
by stashing gunpowder underneath the Parliament building. The
incident is known as the "Gunpowder Plot." But Fawkes and the
gunpowder were discovered before the plan went off, and Fawkes
gave up the names of his co-conspirators under torture.
• To celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, English children ask for money to fund
the explosions of their straw effigies of Fawkes, so they say, "A penny
for the guy?" "Guy" being his first name.
 Section One
• The Hollow Men are lacking something essential.
• They are also "stuffed" with straw, like an effigy of Guy Fawkes
("Second Epigraph") or like a scarecrow.
• They are leaning together to support each other, as if they are
frightened or cannot support themselves.
• They are not happy about their "hollow" condition, either, but they
can only express their unhappiness in the one-word exclamation,
"Alas!"
• The Hollow Men talk without saying anything meaningful.
• They speak in a soft "whisper," as if they are afraid that someone will
hear them.
• In an especially haunting image, their voices are compared to the wind
running through dry grass, which sounds like a quiet rattling or
scraping.
• Or, as a second example, the voices sound like the feet of rats pitter-
pattering over pieces of broken glass "In our dry cellar."
• The first stanza uses "dry" or "dried' three times. The Hollow Men are
dry and do not have blood in the veins. They don't even have veins.
• A shape becomes a form when it has substance. Otherwise it's just an
empty idea.
• "Force" is the power to act or move, but "Paralysed force" is a force
that can't move or act.
• All of these examples are contradictory: they would make no sense in
the real world.
• The Hollow Men are asking people who have crossed into "death's
other Kingdom" to remember them as stuffed and empty men and
not as violent and nasty people.
• For some reason, the Hollow Men never made it to the land of the
dead. They are stuck in no-man's land.
• From a Christian perspective, "death's other Kingdom" sounds like
Heaven, where souls look with "direct eyes" at God.
• The Hollow Men do not have "direct eyes."
 Canto 3 of Dante's Inferno
• In that canto, Dante arrives at the gates of Hell and sees a group of
people wandering around aimlessly and miserably, with lots of tears
and wailing.
• As Dante's guide Virgil says, "They have no hope of death, and their
blind life is so abject that they are envious of every other lot. The
world does not permit report of them. Mercy and justice hold them in
contempt. Let us not speak of them – look and pass by."
• As Virgil explains elsewhere in the canto, these souls did not take
sides in the universal conflict between good and evil. They thought
they lived their lives apart from difficult moral questions. In a sense,
both Dante and Eliot believed that such people are the worst of all,
because they are too timid or indifferent even to do bad things.
 Section Two
• The Hollow Men do not want to look anyone in the eyes. They are timid
and frightened.
• They worry that the eyes of souls from Heaven ("death's dream
kingdom") will enter into their dreams and try to make eye contact.
• The speaker talks about a place out "there" where the eyes shine like
"sunlight on a broken column" and distant voices are carried by the wind,
which also makes a tree sway.
• "There" could be either in their dreams or in "death's dream kingdom.“
• They are too ashamed to confront the reality of what they have become.
They live in a fragmented world of "broken" and "fading" objects.
• The Hollow Men do not want to go anywhere near "death's dream
kingdom," for fear of those truth-revealing eyes.
• The big hint is "crossed staves," which means two wooden poles. They
explain their appearance as an effort not to get recognized by those
probing eyes.
• Just like scarecrows that "behave as the wind behaves" – twisting and
turning without direction.
• At the end of the section, the souls vow not to have a "final meeting"
at "twilight." This meeting could refer to the Last Judgment in
Christian theology and "twilight" could refer to the end of the world.
• The Hollow Men are afraid of the judgment they'll receive when their
character is finally examined by the "eyes." They can only delay
justice, not escape it.
 Section Three
• The Hollow Men live in a region that looks like desert where nothing lives but
cacti that can survive without much water.
• The Hollow Men pray to "stone images," which are like false gods or idols. The
"dead man" is one of the Hollow Men. They are dead in the sense that they do
not have life, but they also cannot cross over into the kingdom of death.
• It's like being trapped at a rest stop on the highway between two destinations.
• To "supplicate" is to beg or ask for something, so the Hollow Men are begging
the stones to help them out of their mess.
• The star might represent hope or salvation, as stars are usually associated with
Heaven. But their hopes are fading fast, and only a small "twinkle" of light
remains.
• All of a sudden the Hollow Men are curious about "death's other
Kingdom."
• They don't really suspect that things are better in Heaven or
anywhere else. Otherwise, they probably would have tried to get
there.
• They want to know if people in the other kingdom also wake up
alone, with warm and tender feelings but no outlet for them except to
pray to a bunch of "broken stone" images.
• The Hollow Men are still worried about those eyes. The eyes from
heaven are not present, but the lines also suggest that the Hollow
Men have no vision.
• There is another way to interpret this line. "Eyes" sounds like "Is", as
in, "The Is are not here." There are no independent personalities or
selves among the group.
• Hope continues to fade, as the stars fade or "die" away.
• They are in a valley of death, but there is no one there to comfort
them because they never joined with God.
• The Hollow Men each used to have their own kingdoms – literally or
metaphorically – but these kingdoms have been lost or broken like a
jaw.
• We finally learn where the Hollow Men are gathered: on the banks of a
swollen or "tumid" river.
• They are huddled together as if they were going to be washed away. The river
is practically overflowing with water, in contrast to the dryness of the men
and the desert around them.
• This is the last place that they will meet before they face some more terrible
fate.
• The river most likely represents Acheron, branch of the mythical River Styx in
Greece that souls must cross into death.
• To make the trip, you would have to pay Charon, the ferryman, a coin to take
you on his boat.
• Unfortunately, no one has arrived to take these souls across. They are
stranded.
• There's nothing left to say about their dire situation, so they "avoid
speech."
 Canto 3 of Dante's Inferno
• Dante asks his guide Virgil why souls are so eager to get across
Acheron, and Virgil responds that God's justice "spurs them on" so
that they actually want to get to Hell sooner.
• But the Hollow Men can't even get to Hell.
• The Hollow Men are "sightless," like a bunch of underground worms,
but if the "eyes" return their vision could be restored.
• Their only hope is if the heavenly eyes come back as a star.
• This star would be "perpetual" or eternal, unlike the "fading" or
"dying" stars in the desert.
• A "multifoliate" rose has many petals.
 Dante's Paradiso
• The final vision of paradise is of a flower made up of saints, angels,
and other examples of goodness and virtue. The community of
Heaven is like a rose with petals made of people. Dante also compares
Mary, the mother of Jesus, to a rose.
• The point of these lines is that the Hollow Men cannot save
themselves. They have no hope except for the Heavenly souls to come
down and restore their vision of truth and goodness.
 Section Five
• "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush" is a children's song about
people dancing around the bush "so early in the morning."
• Eliot actually gives the time at which they are dancing: 5 o'clock in the
morning.
• According to one commentary on the poem, "5:00 a.m. is the
traditional time of Christ's resurrection."
• The resurrection is the most important moment in the Christ story,
but here the Hollow Men are performing a children's dance around a
cactus, totally unaware of the significance of the time.
• For the Hollow Men, some mysterious "shadow" has fallen between
some potential for action and the action itself to prevent them
for doing anything.
• They have "ideas" but cannot bring them into "reality."
• They can "move" but not coordinate their movements into "action."
• The "shadow" falls like an iron curtain to block their intentions.
• The Hollow Men begin to say part of a prayer but do not finish it. "For
Thine is the Kingdom" is part of the ending to the Lord's Prayer that
goes: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever
and ever. Amen.“
• If the Hollow Men could just get to the end of the prayer, maybe they
would be saved.
• The Hollow Men repeat the fragmented lines from the end of the last
three stanzas, but this time chopped down even further.
• They just trail off, as if they can't remember how the rest goes or have
slipped into some semi-conscious state.
• In Eliot's version, the Hollow Men are singing about how the world
ends as they dance around the prickly pear.
• The world ends not with a "bang" like you might expect, with some
huge war between angels and demons, but with a "whimper," like a
defeated puppy.
• The question is, does the world end this way for everyone, or just for
the Hollow Men?