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The poem was first published as now known on 23 November 1925, in Eliot's Poems: 1909–1925. People whose houses were bombed have told him they don't remember hearing anything." Publication information Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either. According to Henry Hewes: "One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone's mind. When asked in 1958 if he would write these lines again, Eliot said he would not. The Lord's Prayer and what appears to be a lyric change of " Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" are written while this devolution of style ends with the final stanza, maybe the most quoted of Eliot's poetry: Īs the poem enters section five, there is a complete breakdown of language. Eliot describes how they wish to be seen " not as lost/Violent souls, but only/As the hollow men/The stuffed men ". Eliot reprises this moment in his poem as the hollow men watch " those who have crossed with direct eyes, to death's other kingdom ". This is the punishment for those in Limbo according to Dante, people who " lived without infamy or praise " They did not put any good or evil into the world, making them out to be 'hollow' people who can only watch others move on into the afterlife. He states that the hollow men " grope together and avoid speech, gathered on this beach of the tumid river ", and Dante states that at the Gates of Hell, people who did neither good nor evil in their lives have to gather quietly by a river where Charon cannot ferry them across. Eliot invokes imagery from the Inferno, specifically the third and fourth cantos of the Inferno which describes Limbo, the first circle of Hell – showing man in his inability to cross into Hell itself or to even beg redemption, unable to speak with God. This awareness of the split between thought and action coupled with their awareness of "death's various kingdoms" and acute diagnosis of their hollowness, makes it hard for them to go forward and break through their spiritual sterility. The "hollow men" fail to transform their motions into actions, conception to creation, desire to fulfillment. Their shame is seen in lines like " eyes I dare not meet in dreams " calling themselves " sightless " and that that " the only hope of empty men ".
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These "hollow men" have the realization, humility, and acknowledgement of their guilt and their status as broken, lost souls. The Hollow Men follows the otherworldly journey of the spiritually dead. Certain quotes from the poem such as " headpiece filled with straw " and " in our dry cellar " seem to be direct references to the Gun Powder Plot. Fawkes attempted arson of the English Houses of Parliament in 1605 and his straw-man effigy is burned each year in the United Kingdom on Guy Fawkes Night, the 5th of November. The two epigraphs to the poem, " Mistah Kurtz – he dead" and " A penny for the Old Guy", are allusions to Conrad's character and to Guy Fawkes. The latter is more likely since Kurtz is mentioned specifically in one of the two epigraphs. The title could also be theorized to originate more transparently from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or from the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who is referred to as a "hollow sham" and "hollow at the core". Eliot wrote that he produced the title "The Hollow Men" by combining the titles of the romance The Hollow Land by William Morris with the poem "The Broken Men" by Rudyard Kipling but it is possible that this is one of Eliot's many constructed allusions.