"The Hollow Men" is a huge downer of a poem. In this way, it fits into the general arc of
T.S. Eliot's career, which can be divided into Huge Downers and Glorious Uppers. For example,
The Wasteland: Huge Downer;
Four Quartets: Glorious Upper.
Clearly we're over-simplifying. But Eliot was going through a rough patch when he wrote "The Hollow Men." His marriage to Vivienne Eliot had collapsed, and some scholars think she was having an affair with the British philosopher
Bertrand Russell. Also, Eliot was still moving toward a religious conversion to Anglicanism that did not arrive until 1927. Several of the poems that Eliot wrote before this conversion concern the total failure of religious hope and love (see, for example, "
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock").
"The Hollow Men" begins with a quote from Joseph Conrad's famous novella
Heart of Darkness, the story of a colonial Englishman who goes power-hungry in Africa, and things only go downhill from there. Eliot's poem is about a group of scarecrow-like individuals who exist in a state between life and death and suffer from a serious case of moral paralysis. They are forever trapped on the banks of the
River Styx, the ancient Greek symbol for the dividing line between life and death. Some critics consider "The Hollow Men" to be a companion piece for Eliot's most famous work,
The Waste Land, another poem about moral paralysis.
Eliot's poems from the 1920s are often read in a political context as a reaction to the aftermath of
World War I. Eliot was preoccupied with the idea of a European literary and ethical tradition, and he saw this tradition fragmenting everywhere around him. He turned, as he often did, to his favorite Italian poet
Dante Alighieri, whose
Inferno was inspiration for this poem. "The Hollow Men" was published in 1925, three years after
The Waste Land. In 1948, Eliot was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature.