/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1606006]

I know you'll probably all call me stupid.

I just read T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men." Then I reread it. Then I reread it. Then I read it again. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. The words just blow my mind and soul. [A simple Google search will bring up this short poem, by the way.]

Here's the thing: I have no idea what the poem means. Can /lit/ help me to understand or begin to understand what this poem is about?

[Anonymous No.1606023]

It's totally my favorite poem, too, OP.

I think we can't say more than it paints a vivid picture of what, emotionally, it means to be a modern man.

Any commentary farther than that depends on the reader.

[Anonymous No.1606039]

>>1606023
Thanks a lot! I read it again. That makes sense. I appreciate the insight.

[Anonymous No.1606042]

>>1606023
I just read it because of this thread and reading it over I can only think it's about dead people. Maybe you see the 'modern man' as being dead but I don't really see any reference to culture in the poem.

There's lots of crop imagery, sky imagery, he keeps referencing kingdoms and the language gets a bit preachy towards the end. I think the fifth part is about the span of an entire human life, the start being someone as a kid in the 'morning at 5' and the ending with a whimper.

Definitely something to think on. But as with all poetry I'm left with the idea that it's just a semantic game and talking about it just gives you new ways to think about it.

[Anonymous No.1606045]

There's a hypertext version available at

http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Poem.htm

I think the internet is an abolutely fantastic resource for studying Eliot's work - he's such a fucking erudite and obcure bastard that he almost pre-empted the hivemind, nerdiness and hypertextuality of the net. He's a lot easier to get these days than when I studied him at school - yeah, oldfag, so what?

[Anonymous No.1606065]

>>1606045
Holly hell. Thanks a lot! Yes, I agree that the Internet has many wonderful resources. I was thinking about that when I discoevered iTunes U last week. [I was a little slow to download the latest version.] Wow! There's a TON of free information on there from experts.

Internet is pretty sweet.

[Anonymous No.1606069]

Some elements are thought to have been discarded from the wasteland:

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.

It can be seen as a companion piece, with the images of deserts and stones and idolatory indicating the spiritual bankruptcy that Eliot saw engulfing the world. The Hollow Men was one of Eliot's last works before converting to Anglicanism, I think.

He sees faith as conquering the banality of the modernist world, but ironically feels compelled to express his howling rage within the modernist tradition. It's the essential push/pull dynamic of Eliot, I think, and it's what makes him such a great poet, he's torn between his hatred of the modern world, and the almost perfect mechanisms it gives him to express that disgruntlement.

[Anonymous No.1606070]

>>1606045
>oldfag
Comrade, you best start believing in oldfag threads.

You're in one.

[Anonymous No.1606089]

>>1606069
I'm planning to read this next with the Norton Critical Edition as a guide. Will the supplementary texts be sufficient, or should I consult other resources?

[Anonymous No.1606099]

>>1606042

>. But as with all poetry I'm left with the idea that it's just a semantic game and talking about it just gives you new ways to think about it.

It's not just a semantic game. It's THE semantic game. The reason poetry enchants and commands across generations is because there are always new games to be played with the language.

I'd agree with you completely about it being about dead people, but when you look at the opening lines and see "headpeice filled with straw", then maybe it could lead to the thought that these people aren't literally, but figuratively dead? That they're dead between the ears as much as anything.

However, I'd also add that this is written in a world still reeling from the impact of The Great War, the seminal event that shattered the world into modernism, and there may also be literal references to dead, or perhaps displaced people, who stuffed their clothes with straw either to a) replace missing heads in the carnage of the trenches or b) keep warm when your house has been blown up.

Just my two cents - you can see it as literally dead people if you want, that's a valid interpretation, but I see it more in reference to people who are spiritually, morally and intellectually dead, rather than literally dead.

[Anonymous No.1606133]

>>1606089

With Eliot, there's always more to read. My English teacher recommended reading the same stuff that Eliot did (Basically he was fucking mental for Conrad, Dante and Frazer's The Golden Bough). But with a poet as complex and intertextual as Eliot, there's always a new opinion, so as much reading around his work as possible always a good idea if you genuinely want to form your own opinion on his work.

[Anonymous No.1606142]

>the impact of The Great War, the seminal event that shattered the world into modernism
Modernism emerged in the 1870s as a response to realism. Like realism, it was critical of middle-class society and accepted morality. However, was not deeply concerned with social issues; rather, modernists were driven by a concern for the aesthetic or the beautiful. Examples of modernist figures include Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, • Igor Stravinsky, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

[Anonymous No.1606175]

>>1606142

Undeniably true, but what is considered to be the apex of modernism is the period between say 1907-1930 (to assign pretty arbitrary dates, 1907 being the year of les demoiselles d'avignon). The modernism of Picasso, Eliot, Hemingway, Stein and is seen by many people, and not just me, to be a reflection of the absolute fractures that were occuring in society at large - The Great War and the Bolshevik revolution occuring in the middle of this period is what informs (in my opinion) a lot of the seeming numbness and distancing in the emblematic modernist authors - it's not simply a question of aesthetics over emotion, it's a reflection of a world devastated by total war, revolution and influenza to the extent that to people of Eliot's generation, it was utterly unrecognisable. Modernism is to some extent the expression of worldwide trauma, which is why I said (perhaps glibly) that the 'War to end all Wars' fractured the world into modernism. Obviously it was a gradual progression building out of early existentialists like Gide, Naturalists like Zola and Eliot's big hero Conrad, but you can't coin nice phrases by concentrating too much on the facts.

[Stagolee !0Pey/QLK3E No.1606204]

the last lines of the hollow men always give me goosebumps

[Anonymous No.1606265]

>>1606204

>He thinks it's about atom bombs and all his teenage fears

[Stagolee !0Pey/QLK3E No.1606286]

>>1606265
it's clearly about death retard

[Anonymous No.1606341]

>>1606286

>it's clearly about death retard

Whose death fuckknuckle?

Oh yeah, you don't know, because you're a cunt. Well, I'll tell you - Guy Fawkes' fucking death, that's whose.

He didn't die with the "bang " he expected, but with a "whimper" as he finally expired after days of torture and mutilation.

Eliot himself said that they were the most misunderstood lines he ever wrote, and that if he had the chance again, he'd end the poem four lines earlier.

You're a fucking tard, Stagster. You're a total joke.

[Stagolee !0Pey/QLK3E No.1606350]

>>1606341
nice wikipedia bro

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men#Overview
>This last line alludes to, amongst some talk of war, the actual end of the Gunpowder Plot mentioned at the beginning: not with its planned bang, but with Guy Fawkes's whimper, as he was caught, tortured and executed on the gallows.

either way it's still about death and boy you sure do look stupid now dont you !

[Anonymous No.1606363]

>>1606350
No, Stag. You always look more stupid than the rest of /lit/. You're just going to have to deal with it.

[Anonymous No.1606365]

>>1606363

I think you look stupider right now.

[Stagolee !0Pey/QLK3E No.1606369]

>>1606363
>IT'S NOT ABOUT DEATH! IT'S ABOUT GUY FAWKES' DEATH! TOTALLY DIFFERENT! GOD YOU ARE SO UNBELIEVABLY STUPID

[Anonymous No.1606377]

>>1606350

Yeah sure, fuckspastic - if only you'd used your awesome wikiwizardry before you started posting shit you clearly didn't understand, eh, son? It's not about "death", it's about "a death", and I didn't need to go to fucking wikipedia to know it, because any relatively educated person, who's paid the slightest attention to the study of Eliot over the years, actually knew this already. It's called education - it saves a lot of time on the search pages. Try it. Then come back. Then fuck off again.

[Stagolee !0Pey/QLK3E No.1606383]

>>1606377
see
>>1606369

also
>he studies poetry!

[Anonymous No.1606392]

>>1606383
Stag, man, you are failing pretty hard.

Not even samefag. That's how hard you are failing.

[Anonymous No.1606394]

>>1606392
Not even samefag. You're the one who's failing here.

[Stagolee !0Pey/QLK3E No.1606400]

>>1606392
i'm not failing itt, i'm winning

studying poetry is useless if you can gather the same info from a wikipedia entry and remember it

[Anonymous No.1606412]

Hollow Men turned me on to Eliot, now he's my favorite poet. I really think his way with words has been unmatched since Shakespeare and Donne.

The Hollow Men and The Waste Land are about the post-WWI situation in Europe, where it seemed to Eliot and others of the Lost Generation that the old European culture had failed, leaving a ruin. Eliot compares it to Limbo from Dante's Inferno, showing faceless muttering straw men muttering half forgotten prayers. Their raison-de'tre is gone. BUT he was not an existentialist, Eliot felt that the way to bring back meaning to post-war modern man was to reinvent old mythological stories and apply them to modern times. He called it his "mythic method." Although hope for hollow Europe may be as remote a dying star (multifoliate rose may be a symbol for the Virgin Mary), it still exists. The Hollow Men is probably the bleakest of Eliot's poems. The Waste Land is similar in tone, but ends on a note of rebirth.

[Anonymous No.1606416]

>>1606412 again.
P.S.: "A penny for the Old Guy" refers to Guy Fawkes' Day celebrations in England, where kids would go house to house asking for change to buy fireworks, to burn straw effigies of Guy Fawkes.

[KOZ !!n414dW6hO/U No.1606438]

>T.S. ELIOT

[Anonymous No.1606439]

>>1606416

And that's the point of the straw men - effigies burnt in place of actual sacrifices on the bonfires of England, where in traditional british rituals people were burnt in wicker men, yet another reference to the pagan idols referenced throughout the poem.

Hence the fact that the final four lines of the poem reference not "Death", but "a death", the death of Guy Fawkes. Eliot was living in England at the time, and naturalised as a british citizen shortly after writing Hollow Men, and I think this slightly weird tradition of the british, of burning a catholic6in effigy was particularly occupying him as part of his "mythic method", as Anon above has mentioned.

You're not winning a fucking thing, Stags, you're failing so hard that for the first time in my life I've actually got people agreeing with me on /lit/.

You know literally fuck all - you're like a literary quadriplegic, and because the only resource you have access to is wiki, you assume the same of everyone else. You see, I can not only know the things you know from wiki, but I can relate it to other parts of the poem, and if necessary, to Eliots ouevre.

You, on the other hand, are a frightened little cunt.

[Stagolee !0Pey/QLK3E No.1606454]

>>1606439
having all of that "knowledge" isn't really praiseworthy considering anyone can obtain it with a library card

why don't you study a real subject, like physics or biology

[Anonymous No.1606457]

>>1606439
Thanks for the info! I hadn't connected the "bang" with the gunpowder plot, nor the effigies with pagan rites. Good stuff!