The hollow men
The hollow men (original title: The Hollow Men ) is a poem by the Anglo-American poet TS Eliot , which appeared for the first time in 1925.
It was his first major publication since the publication of Das wüsten Land , which had made him a world-renowned poet in 1922. Like its predecessor, The Hollow Men is contemporary poetry , which deals with the mental state of Europe after the First World War and, in particular, the circumstances of the Versailles Treaty .
The poem, which is divided into five sections, begins with the declaration of the lyric self that it belongs to a group of "hollow men". Eliot describes people as dead or ghosts. In this he saw the problem of man in the modern age . The present world is only the "other kingdom of death" ( death's other kingdom , verse 14).
Like many of Eliot's longer poems ( The Hollow Men consists of 98 verses), many topics are only sketched out fragmentarily and intermingle. In addition to the lifeless portrayal of everyday life after the war, questions about and about religion also come into play. Towards the end of the piece Eliot repeatedly quotes a sentence from the Lord's Prayer ( because yours is the kingdom , in the fifth section).
The hollow men ends with the paragraph that became one of the most famous quotes from T. S. Eliot's complete works and modern poetry:
- This is how the world perishes
- This is how the world perishes
- This is how the world perishes
- Not with a bang: with a whimper
(Original English: This is the way the world ends .... Not with a bang but a whimper )
According to literary historians, the title The Hollow Men is a combination of The Hollow Land by William Morris and The Broken Men by Rudyard Kipling . At the beginning of his work Eliot quotes Joseph Conrad and his famous work Heart of Darkness .
As with Ash Wednesday, the fragmentary style of the poem can be explained by the fact that Eliot often collected various poems for a long time in order to then combine them to form a new long poem. This makes interpretation difficult for many. The first German translation of the poem was done by Hans Magnus Enzensberger .
Eliot and his work have been quoted many times, such as E.g. in the final monologue of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now , in the TV series Mad Men , Marvel's Agents of Shield and Dexter or at the beginning of the novel The Stand - The Last Stand by the author Stephen King .
Information about the publication
The poem was first published in the form known today on November 23, 1925 in Eliot's Poems : 1909–1925 . Eliot was known for collecting poetry and poem fragments to create new works. This becomes clear in his poems The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday , in which he combined previously published poems into sections of a larger work. Four of the five sections of the poem have been published earlier:
- Poème , published in the Winter 1924 edition of Commerce (with a French translation), became Part I of The Hollow Men .
- Doris' Dream Songs in the November 1924 edition of the Chapbook had the three poems: Eyes that last I saw in tears, The wind sprang up at four o'clock and This is the dead land . The third poem became Part III of The Hollow Men .
- Three poems by Eliot appeared in the January 1925 issue of Criterion magazine : Eyes I dare not meet in dreams , Eyes that I last saw in tears, and The eyes are not here . The first poem became Part II of The Hollow Men and the third became Part IV.
Individual evidence
- ^ Donald Gallup: TS Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended Edition) . 1969, p. 33, 210-211 .