The document provides biographical information about T.S Eliot and summarizes his major poems including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. It then discusses Eliot's poem The Hollow Men, describing its themes of fragmented identities, allusions to religious texts, and symbolism of dryness and brokenness to represent the hollow state of humanity after World War 1.

1. By
T. S Eliot
Submitted to: MS Sana
Submitted by: Sajida
Subject: Translation Studies
M.Phil Applied Linguistics, UOL.

2. T. S Eliot
• Thomas Stearns Eliot (1925) was a British,
American-born essayist, publisher, playwright,
literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth
century's major poets.“He immigrated to England
in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying
there.
• He is the Nobel-Prize- winning modernist poet.
• Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), which is seen as a
masterpiece of the Modernist movement.

3. T.S Eliot
• . It was followed by some of the best-known
poems in the English language, including The
Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash
Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945).[3]
He is also known for his seven plays, particularly
Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
• He died of emphysema at his home in Kensington
in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated
at Golders Green Crematorium. In accordance with
his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and
All Angels' Church, East Coker, America. A wall
plaque commemorates him with a quotation from
his poem "East Coker", "In my beginning is my
end. In my end is my beginning."
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4. • In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death,
Eliot was commemorated by the installation of
stone, is inscribed with a quotation from his poem
"Little Gidding", "the communication / of the dead
is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the
living.”
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5. Hollow Men
• The Hollow Men
• by T. S. Eliot
• Written 1925
• Country England
• Language English
• Lines 98
• American Poet

6. Hollow Men
• Introduction
• Title
• Epigraph
• Motifs
• Poem
• Paraphrasing
• Analysis
• Allusion
• Literary devices
• Symbolism and imagery
• Music and Singing
• Form and meter
• Style(monologue)
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7. • Sound Check
• Setting
• Passivity
• Dreams and Hope
• Language Shift
• Tone
• Culture Shock
• Linguistics codes
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8. Back
Next• The Hollow Men appeared in 1925.
• For the critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "The
nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given
such effective expression in The Waste Land.
• It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. Similar
to Eliot's other works especially, Waste Land.
Which is macro level picture of moral decline and
it is a micro level picture of moral decline.
• Its themes are overlapping and fragmentary. Post-
war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which
Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious
conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.

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Hollow Men
• Suggestive title: Poet is talking about 'empty’ or
‘shallow men’ or ‘stuffed men’.
• Epigraph: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, attempted
arsonist of the English house of Parliament,
and his straw-man effigy that is burned each
year in the United Kingdom on Guy Fawkes
Night.

10. Motifs
1. The Damaged Psyche of Humanity
a. Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his
poetry to express the fragile psychological state of
humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of
Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War.
b. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and
he imagined that culture was crumbling and
dissolving.
2. The Power of Literary History
a. Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the
Western literary canon, and he packed his work
full of allusions, quotations, footnotes, and
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11. • The Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of
various elements of literary and mythic
traditions with scenes and sounds from
modern life. The effect of this poetic collage
is both a reinterpretation of canonical texts
and a historical context for his examination
of society and humanity.
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Motifs

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Motifs
3. The Changing Nature of Gender Roles
• Over the course of Eliot’s life, gender roles and
sexuality became increasingly flexible, and Eliot
reflected those changes in his work. In the
repressive Victorian era of the nineteenth century,
women were confined to the domestic sphere,
sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored.
• Women were allowed to attend school, and women
who could afford it continued their education at
those universities that began accepting women in
the early twentieth century.

13. Fragmentation
• Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to
demonstrate the chaotic state of modern
existence and to juxtapose literary texts
against one another. In Eliot’s view,
humanity’s psyche had been shattered by
World War I and by the collapse of the
British Empire.
• He himself says, “These fragments I have
shored against my ruins”.
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Mythic and Religious Ritual
• Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth,
religious ritual, academic works, and key
books in the literary tradition informs every
aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with
references to both the obscure and the well
known, thereby teaching his readers as he
writes i.e. Charon from Greek Mythology
and get one coin as fare, Divine Comedy of
Virgil, etc.

15. Infertility
• Starting lines of the poem reveals that the
speaker’s mind to become infertile and his
head has been filled with straw. He is now
unable to think properly, to perceive
accurately, or to conceive of images or
thoughts. 'We are the hollow men / We are
the stuffed men.'
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Paraphrasing
“We are the hollow men……Shape without
form- shade without colour,Paralysed force,
gesture without motion”
• A shape becomes a form when it has
substance. Otherwise it's just an empty idea,
like the difference between the ball you
imagine in your head (a shape) and a ball of
dough (a form).
• In the same line of thought, you can't have a
"shade" without "color," because "shade" is
a degree of color. But somehow, the Hollow
Men have one without the other.

17. Lines 39-44
The Hollow Men pray to "stone images," which are like false
gods or idols. The "dead man" is one of the Hollow Men.
Because they do not have life, but they also cannot cross over
into the kingdom of death.It's like being trapped at a rest stop
on the highway between two destinations.To "supplicate" is to
beg or ask for something, so they are begging the stones to
help them out of their mess.Back
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18. Lines 52-56
The Hollow Men are still worried about those eyes. The eyes
from heaven are not present, but the lines also suggest that the
Hollow Men have no vision.There is another way to interpret
this line. "Eyes" sounds like "Is", as in, "The Is are not here."
There are no independent personalities or selves among the
group.Hope continues to fade, as the stars fade or "die"
away.At any rate, here the only true kingdom is the Kingdom
of God, and they had their chance to join it but did not.
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19. Next
Their only hope is if the heavenly eyes come back as a
star.This star would be "perpetual" or eternal, unlike the
"fading" or "dying" stars in the desert. By now you've probably
noticed that Eliot is throwing around symbols like candy at a
Fourth of July parade.
The point of these lines is that the Hollow Men cannot save
themselves. They have no hope except for the Heavenly souls
to come down and restore their vision of truth and goodness.
Lines 61-67

20. Lines 68-71
And if you didn't have a mulberry bush, well, then you'd just have to sing
about the "prickly pear" cactus.
"Here we go 'round the mulberry bush" is a children's song about people
dancing around the bush "so early in the morning."Eliot actually gives the
time at which they are dancing: 5 o'clock in the morning.
According to one commentary on the poem, "5:00 a.m. is the traditional
time of Christ's resurrection" (source).The resurrection is the most
important moment in the Christ story, but here the Hollow Men are
performing a children's dance around a cactus, totally unaware of the
significance of the time.
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21. Lines 78-83
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response…….
Here comes that Shadow again.
"Conception" is the moment of
pregnancy or the beginning of
idea, but "creation" is when that
being comes into existence. An
"emotion" is a mental state, but a
response is an action resulting
from that state.If you went to the
doctor and he or she tapped your
knee with that little rubber
hammer, and you had no physical
response, it’s a "Life is very
long."Hollow Men sighing
wearily as they say that, as if they
are bored and worn down.
Compared to eternity, of course,
life is pretty short.
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22. Lines 92-94
For Thine is…….For Thine is the
• The Hollow Men just trail off, as if they
can't remember how the rest goes or have
slipped into some semi-conscious state. Cut
them some slack, though their heads are
filled with straw.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
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23. "This is the way we wash our
clothes" and "This is the way we
sweep the floor." They dance around
the prickly pear.
These lines are the most famous and
frequently repeated lines in the
poem.
The world ends not with a "bang"
like you might expect, with some
huge war between angels and
demons, but with a "whimper," like
a defeated puppy.
The question is, does the world end
this way for everyone, or just for the
Hollow Men? Thus the big thing
always endup in a small gesture.
Another truth is that death of lay
men is not publically declared.
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24. Analysis
Epithet: Eliot ornaments his poem with
epithet from Latin Classical literature.
Inversion: He also use inversion, first he
develop hope then he frustrates the reader.
Binaries:
Eliot uses several technique to highlight his
ideas through repetition, binaries, i.e. day
and night, men and women, idea and
reality.
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25. Allusions
• This poem is very allusive, there are many allusions like where the
Hollow Men are gathered: on the banks of a swollen or "tumid" river.
The river most likely represents Acheron, branch of the mythical River
Styx in Greece that souls must cross into death .To make the trip, you
would have to pay Charon, the ferryman, a coin to take you on his boat.
Unfortunately, no one has arrived to take these souls across.
• There is an other allusion of Dante; Divine Comedy .They are
stranded. There's nothing left to say about their dire situation, so they
"avoid speech."In Canto 3 of Dante's Inferno, Dante asks his guide
Virgil why souls are so eager to get across Acheron, and Virgil
responds that God's justice "spurs them on" so that they actually want to
get to Hell. But the Hollow Men can't even get to Hell.
• A penny for the Old Guy: The English celebrate Guy Fawkes Day
every November 5th with fireworks and the burning of little straw men
or "effigies.“
• The first epigraph is a quote from a servant in Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness.

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Imagery
• There are extensive use of auditory
imagery in this poem. The Hollow Men's
description of their voice as being "As quiet
and meaningless / As wind in dry grass"
could apply to the sound of the poem as a
whole, without the meaningless part. This
poem is of...
• Whereas Eliot Picturesque style enable
the reader to visualized the verses.

27. Visual imagery
• the dream of death as life goes farther away.
The whispers of the hollow men emphasize
the unimportance or insignificance of words
within our lives, and in our deaths, for nothing
can be said to change the process.
• Through the imagery formed by Eliot,
both visual and auditory, the reader can be
placed within the path of enlightenment. The
first step to enlightenment is going through a
desert land, which leaves a sense of infertility
and suffering. The placement of only visual
and auditory leaves the olfactory imagery out.Back

28. Back
Symbolism
• Water: water symbolizes both life and
death. Although water has the regenerative
possibility of restoring life and fertility, it
can also lead to drowning and death.
• Music and Tone: Like most modernist
writers, Eliot was interested in the divide
between high and low culture, which he
symbolized using music. He believed that
high culture, including art, opera, and
drama, was in decline. Eliot splices nursery
rhymes with phrases from the Lord’s Prayer
in “The Hollow Men,”

29. Symbol of Scarecow

30. Scarecrow
• They wear ragged clothes and stand in a
field, supported by wooden poles or
"crossed staves."Everything is dried and
hollowed out, as in a war-stricken town or
the scene of a terrorist attack. In line 25,
their aimless behavior is compared using
simile to the motions of the wind.
• Eyes:The Hollow Men are like that. They
fear the judgmental glare of the people from
"death's dream kingdom," but the eyes of...”

31. The Shadow
• "The Shadow" isn't just the name of a
superhero movie starring Alec Baldwin, it's
also the name of the mysterious symbol of
darkness that disconnects causes from
effects and completely messes with...

32. Heaven:
The Hollow Men never speak of Heaven by
name. In fact, they seem afraid to do so.
They are curious about what "death's dream
kingdom" is like, but they also fear the
"eyes" of heavenly souls and th...

33. Dryness
The beginning of the poem establishes that
the Hollow Men live in a dry and barren
world. The presence of cacti confirms that
the poem is set in a desert. Dryness is a
symbol for lack of life.
Broken Things
• Everything around the Hollow Men is
broken – nothing is complete. You wouldn't
want to lend anything valuable to the Hollow
Men or it would probably come back broken.

34. Setting
The Hollow Men live in a desert nether
world that looks like it could be in outer
space. Everything around them is bone dry.
Everything, that is, except for the Acheron, a
branch of the River Styx,...
Speaker:The poem is a dramatic
monologue of sorts, which means that
the speaker is not just a stand-in for the
poet. Instead, Eliot puts words in the
mouths of the Hollow Men and allows
them to explain the...

35. Passivity
The Hollow Men have a bad case of ‘The
Shadow’. Like we sit down to do something
and we blame shadow.
Language Shift
Simple Language with description of common
things.

36. Tone
• Pessimistic tone with confused mind.
Culture Shock
• Society was morally declined. Owning to
war man power have lost their belief on
heroism. Now valour was no more symbol
of heroic essence. People rather to seek a
positive way involve in purposeless
activities.

37. Style
Like most modernist poetry, 'The Hollow
Men' is written in free verse style, with many
shifts in voice and point of view. Eliot was a
fan of including abundant references to
historical events and other literary works. It
is recommended to read through the poem
first to get an idea of the overall meaning.
Only after this initial step should the reader
then delve into the subtle references and
'world beyond the text' so characteristic of
Eliot's style.

38. Form and Meter
• If you had to label the poem as anything, you
would have to call it "free verse," because it
doesn't have a regular meter or rhyme
scheme.