The Hollow Men as a modern poem

The Hollow Men

T.S. Eliot

The Hollow Men as a modern poem.

Answer: The Hollow Men is a poem by American modernist poet T.S. Eliot. It was first published in 1925. Modernity, as we find in poetry, is a whole new way of thinking, a new worldview and a new perspective on man and the universe. The early twentieth century saw the water-logging of human history as it brought about unprecedented political, social, economic and scientific transformations that transformed a modern world characterized by chaos, discontent, isolation and moral decay. Modernism embraced these changes and a new artistic presentation was inevitable.

The modernist composition changed from realism to abstraction, as the abstract can be seen as more expressive than concrete. A strong and conscious break with the conventional forms of modernist literature was marked by intentional complexity and non-familiarity, resulting in refutation and bold, highly innovative experiments in prose and poetry.

Unpublished and dreamlike, The Hollow Men describes a lonely world inhabited by empty, defeated people. Although the speaker describes these people as “dead” and the world they live in as the underworld (the “twilight state of death”), the poem should not be read merely as a description of life after death. It is also a reflection of the tragic state of European culture after the First World War. For the speaker of the poem, the horrors of war have plunged Europe into deep despair, and it is so deep that European culture itself is disappearing.

T. S. Eliot represents the poem The Hollow Men as one of the modernist poems in various ways. First, modernist poetry is shorter, more self-contained, and more open to interpretation than the poetry of earlier eras. "The Hollow Men" uses very short lines and divides itself into relatively small parts. Since many elements of the poem are not clearly defined, it leaves room to explain who "we" are, who "I" is and what "this ... land" is. The last part in particular can be explained in a variety of ways.

Second, modernist poems often seem fragmentary or isolated as they may have no recognizable patterns or story progress. This is of course the case with "The Hollow Men". Each section does not seem to be specifically related to the next part, and in the last stanza, there is only one piece of nursery rhyme.

Third, modernist poems often prefer to leave no questions unanswered. While The Hollow Men ends with a firm declaration of how the world will end, what form the "whip" will take is controversial. The question of "is it like this in other states of death" is never answered, nor is there any solution to the problems that "hollow men" face in modern life.

Ultimately, modernist poems reject traditional verse forms even as they reject objective truth - appearing in concrete, determined objects from real life. So the Lord’s Prayer, formerly extended by the majority of the people, now seems broken and weak. Instead of making the image of God for the purpose mentioned by men, men are still empty stuff.

The end of The Hollow Men can only be the beginning of a deeper and longer reflection for thoughtful readers. T.S. Eliot, who always believed that his beginnings were at the end of his life, he died and kept his verses full of secret messages to be understood, and the codes had to be abolished. It is this complexity, which makes Eliot's poetry very generally modern, as a literary movement at the center of modernity.

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