The Hollow Men Analysis

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The Hollow Men - T.S. Elliot Critical Appreciation by Tom N. The Hollow Men, written by T.S. Elliot, is a post-first world war poem that tells of a group of scarecrow-like individuals who exist in a state between life and death and who are morally confused. It reflects the negative feelings that Elliot suffered after a failed marriage and was written while he was moving toward a religious conversion to Anglicanism. The Hollow Men contains a lot of wordplay, metaphors and imagery to convey the ideas expressed by the “Hollow Men”. Divided in five sections, the first describes “hollow”, “stuffed” men leaning together. The use of these opposing terms is to portray the emptiness of these men who have their head “filled with straw”. Everything about them is dry: their “headpiece”, “dried voices” and “dry cellar”. When they “whisper together” they are afraid, which explains why they are leaning together. The Hollow Men are not happy with their condition, but as their voice is “quiet and meaningless”, they can only express their unhappiness in the one-word exclamation, “Alas!”. Elliot uses examples of other things that also have missing essentials: “Shape without form, shade without colour”. A shape cannot be without a form, just as a shade cannot be without colour (a shade is a colour). Elliot shows that the Hollow Men are incomplete. The next paragraph hints at where they are: “Those who have crossed […] to death’s other Kingdom”. The Hollow Men are stuck in between the land of life and death; they never made it to “death’s other Kingdom”. They also want the people who have crossed to go to the land of the dead to remember them as “the Hollow Men, the stuffed men”, and not as “Violent souls”, bad men. In the second section, one of the Hollow Men describes how he is afraid to look in the eyes of people who have made it to “death’s dream kingdom”. He is frightened by
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