Hayward: “Postscript. ‘The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide’, Thoughts After Lambeth 32. The Inferno of The Waste Land, in fact, looks forward to a Purgatory. It is not, as some critics have supposed, a poem of disillusionment.”
[Poem I 71, 346 · Textual History II 407–408]
The Hollow Men
1. Sequence of Publication 2. Composition 3. After Publication
1. SEQUENCE OF PUBLICATION
The five parts of The Hollow Men and the two poems Eyes that last I saw in tears—which was a revision of Song (“The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch”)—and The wind sprang up at four o’clock were written separately and tried out in various combinations. The title The Hollow Men appeared first in Dial Mar 1925, above what became I, II and IV. TSE dated the whole poem “1924” in Hayward’s 1925.
Chronological order of first appearance Places of publication
Part I Commerce (singly); Dial (as I)
Eyes that last I saw in tears Chapbook (as I), Criterion (as II)
The wind sprang up at four o’clock Chapbook (as II)
Part III Chapbook (as III)
Part II Criterion (as I); Dial (as II)
Part IV Criterion (as III); Dial (as III)
Part V 1925
I: dated “Nov. 1924”, Commerce (Paris) Winter 1924[/25], with title “POÈME” on preceding recto, and with “Adaptation de St.-John Perse” facing. (TSE to Leonard Woolf, 28 July 1926: “I think their principle of printing verse in the original language with a French translation is a good one.”) Reprinted in Dial Mar 1925 as first of three parts, under the title The Hollow Men. Reprinted singly in The Best Poems of 1925 ed. L. A. G. Strong, which preceded 1925 by days.
II and IV: Criterion Jan 1925, within “Three Poems By Thomas Eliot” (as “I” and “III” with Eyes that last I saw in tears as “II”). Then reprinted in Dial Mar 1925 under the heading The Hollow Men, as “II” and “III”, following “I” (“We are the hollow men”).
[Poem I 79–84 · Textual History II 417–20]
III: Chapbook [Nov] 1924, within Doris’s Dream Songs (as “III”, with Eyes that last I saw in tears as “I” and The wind sprang up at four o’clock as “II”). To Harold Monro (editor of Chapbook), 13 Oct 1924, of Doris’s Dream Songs: “The title is not good, but it has a connexion for me, and I can’t think of a better.” Doris, from Sweeney Erect, reappears in Sweeney Agonistes. (This sequence was retitled Three Dream Songs in American Poetry 1925 ed. Louis Untermeyer, which preceded 1925 by eleven weeks.) The letter to Monro continued: “I am sorry to make trouble. But, as I particularly should not be willing to appear on the same page with anyone else, I will immediately produce another ½ page of verse if you have any difficulty with the cul-de-lampe.” An illustrative tailpiece by McKnight Kauffer filled the second of the two printed pages on which TSE’s verses appeared. To Ottoline Morrell, 30 Nov 1924: “I am pleased that you like the poems—they are part of a longer sequence which I am doing—I laid down the principles of it in a paper I read at Cambridge, on Chapman, Dostoevski and Dante—and which is a sort of avocation to a much more revolutionary thing I am experimenting on” (that is, Sweeney Agonistes). The paper he had read became A Neglected Aspect of George Chapman (1925).
V: first published in 1925.
The Hollow Men (I–V) was collected in 1925+ and Penguin / Sel Poems, but always with a line missing from the end of II (see note).
For Eyes that last I saw in tears and The wind sprang up at four o’clock see “Minor Poems”. For TSE’s rearrangements of all these elements (and their relation to Dante’s Vita Nuova), see Bush 86–100.
Recorded, 1933, Harvard; released Mar 1934 by Harvard Vocarium Records. Second: 13 May 1947, Harvard, as part of the Morris Gray Poetry Reading (following The Waste Land I: “Now, to finish off that same period, The Hollow Men”).
2. COMPOSITION
To Alfred Kreymborg, 6 Feb 1923: “I think it will take me a year or two to throw off The Waste Land and settle down and get at something better which is tormenting me by its elusiveness in my brain.” To Louis Untermeyer, 4 July 1924: “I have written nothing whatsoever for three years and I do not see any immediate likelihood of my writing · · · it will be utterly impossible for me to write anything by next November.” TSE was working at Lloyds Bank, and busy with journals in Britain, America and Europe. James Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 9 Nov 1924, that “Mr Eliot had to fly over here to see what Shaun calls the proprietoress”—Marguerite Caetani (Princess di Bassiano), who was helping to fund the Criterion. Her journal Commerce published Part I of The Hollow Men in 1924, Parts I and III of Ash-Wednesday in 1928 and 1929, and Difficulties of a Statesman in 1931. Pound to his father, 21 June 1923: “The Princess Bassiano is one of those agreeable american ex-flappers married to an Eyetalian · · · very well behaved, gave us an excellent lunch in midst of good and very bad literary company · · · She enthused over Eliot for half an hour, was going to do something for Bel Esprit, and has since mislaid the matter (like any other sassiety enthusiast.)” (For “Bel Esprit”, see headnote to The Waste Land, 2. FROM COMPLETION TO PUBLICATION: BONI & LIVERIGHT.)
TSE to Harold Monro, 5 Oct 1924: “I am sending you the only things that I have. Print them if you like or not, I dare say that they are bad enough to do the Chapbook no good and to bring me considerable discredit. If you want them you are welcome, if not, I am very sorry that I have done nothing better that I could give you. They were all written for another purpose and perhaps would not look quite so foolish in their proper context as they probably do by themselves.” Next day TSE requested return of the three manuscripts. “I promise that you shall have them back or their verse equivalent by hand in the evening. I know you are in a hurry, and I wont let you down, but I must have them back today.” To Jane Heap, 6 Oct 1924: “I have been working in a method of repetition and variation lately.” Conrad Aiken to Maurice Firuski, 15 Dec 1924: “Tom says he is now out of humour with The Waste Land, Portrait of a Lady, Prufrock, Gerontion, and in short almost everything except the Preludes. He has been doing some new things” (Huntington).
[Poem I 79–84 · Textual History II 417–20]
TSE to Marguerite Caetani, 5 Dec 1924: “I propose to send you, as soon as work and worry will allow me, MS copies of five new short poems. I.e. I compose on the typewriter, but there will be no other copies of these poems in long hand.” No such manuscripts are now known. Of the seven elements listed above, Commerce had already printed Part I, while Part V seems not yet to have been written, since it was not among those sent to Scofield Thayer on 6 Jan 1925 for the Dial. So the “five new short poems” TSE had in mind were probably those that had appeared in the Chapbook and Criterion: Eyes that last I saw in tears, The wind sprang up at four o’clock and II–IV.
For TSE’s submission to Scofield Thayer on 6 Jan 1925 of five elements for use in the Dial, see description of ts3 in Textual History. To Thayer, 20 Mar 1925, on the appearance there of I, II and IV: “I am glad that you like the poems. I am not altogether satisfied with them myself. If, however, the other one [Part V] is written, I will let you have it.” (Apparently he did not.)
To Harold Monro, 25 Apr 1925: “I should like very much to be represented in the next Chapbook, but your date is rather hopeless. I simply can’t do any writing until I have had a holiday. I don’t expect to be able to make any promises until October.” 7 July: “I have not a shred of verse or prose which would be of any use to you. If I had time, I should make a great effort to fabricate something.” But TSE did not publish again in Chapbook after [Nov] 1924.
To L. A. G. Strong, 30 June 1925, concerning The Best Poems of 1925: “I am still in doubt as to how I wish this suite to be arranged; as
a matter of fact, it is not quite complete. Therefore I should be very glad if you would use only the poem which provides the title, i.e. Part I of the three poems printed in the Dial. This is the only one with which I am at present satisfied.” (For titles with analogies to musical forms such as suites, see note to the title Preludes.)
To Pound, 13 Oct 1925, asking for a reply post-haste, before proceeding with his first Faber collection, 1925, in which The Hollow Men was the only new work:
Re enclosed, esp. II, III and IV can you tell me by return
(1) Is it too bad to print?
(2) If not, can anything be done to it? Can it be cleaned up in any way?
I feel I want something of about this length (I–V) to end the volume as post-Waste.
3. AFTER PUBLICATION
To Wyndham Lewis, 9 Jan 1926, on the publication of 1925, containing, at the end, The Hollow Men: “I wanted to collect all my stuff and get rid of it in one volume so as to get it out of my own way and make a fresh start. I observe that no one but yourself has made any comment on the last part of the volume, so I take it that everyone is waiting for everyone else to decide whether any notice need be taken of it or not.”
[Poem I 79–84 · Textual History II 417–20]
To Aiken, 13 May 1927, on Modern American Poets (1927), where Aiken printed the whole of The Hollow Men: “I have received from Knopf a cheque for twenty five dollars, being my share of payment for selected rights from the book of poems which they published used by you in your anthology. They say that they received fifty dollars from the Modern Library Inc. for the right to republish in that anthology. Can you tell me if this is O.K.? Don’t think I am grumbling about the price because I didn’t expect much anyway and I am quite satisfied with this, only I should like to check up on Knopf. Can you illuminate me on another point? With my consent you published in this anthology The Hollow Men. I am not worrying about royalty on this, which is nothing to do with Knopf; but I should like to know: one or two sections of The Hollow Men were never printed in America before. They were printed in England over a year ago. Does this printing in America in your anthology secure copyright in America for those parts of the poem?” (Actually only Part V had not previously appeared in America.)
To Miss Judith Wogan, 30 Dec 1929: “However much I appreciate the compliment, and with the most sincere good wishes for the start of the Grafton Theatre, I had rather not have The Hollow Men staged at the present time.”
To Marianne Moore, 31 Jan 1934: “I have not yet ‘enough’ either to bring out an expanded Collected Poems or a second volume. The Hollow Men ends a period; and I must wait until the next period has enough weight (not necessarily bulk) to balance the first.”
To Henry Eliot, 1 Jan 1936: “Of course motives are mixed; and therefore it behooves the Christian convert to analyse his own motives for conversion, to confess and reject the bad ones, and lay hold on the good. I believe that this consequence was indicated by my previous interests—my interest in Sanskrit and Pali literature for example, and in the philosophy of Bergson; and that my abortive attempt to make myself into a professor of philosophy was due to a religious preoccupation. But I cannot see that desire for notoriety, or for being on the right side, had anything to do with it. I think that the poems which you mistakenly call ‘blasphemous’—‘Hippopotamus’ and ‘Morning Service’ point to this end (incidentally, I have written one blasphemous poem, The Hollow Men: that is blasphemy because it is despair, it stands for the lowest point I ever reached in my sordid domestic affairs).” To Mrs. Yeo, 29 Jan 1936, giving permission for inclusion in an anthology: “I must allow myself to wonder, however, why The Hollow Men should appear classified under the heading ‘Social Disease’. I think that ‘Spiritual Disease’ would be the proper heading, but I notice that you have no such category.” To Elizabeth Winters, 18 Sept 1944: “I am afraid that if there was ever any original manuscript of the poem it has long since disappeared, and it is not a poem for which I should care to provide notes.”
To Joyce Handford, 22 Apr 1953, expressing surprise that The Hollow Men had been “a poem, an understanding of which was required for a school leaving examination, for which it seems to me not particularly suitable · · · It does not seem to me, in fact, a poem which can be explained. What is important is not what the author thought he was doing, put in other terms, but simply what you get out of it yourself.”
*
Mina Loy: “The human cylinders | Revolving in the enervating dark · · · Among the litter of a sunless afternoon | Having eaten without tasting | Talked without communion · · · Leaning brow to brow · · · Destroy the Universe | With a solution”, Human Cylinders in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1917), which also included Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Compared to Loy’s poem Effectual Marriage, however, TSE found Human Cylinders “not so good”, Observations (1918). Her poem had itself been influenced by TSE. For her poem At the Door of the House in the same anthology, see note to The Waste Land [I] 43–59.
[Poem I 79–84 · Textual History II 417–20]
TSE on Marston’s two “tragical plays”: “Marston’s minor comic characters · · · are as completely lifeless as the major characters. Whether decent or indecent, their drollery is as far from mirth-provoking as can be: a continuous and tedious rattle of dried peas. And yet something is conveyed, after a time, by the very emptiness and irrelevance of this empty and irrelevant gabble; there is a kind of significant lifelessness in this shadow-show. There is no more unarticulated scarecrow in the whole of Elizabethan drama than Sir Jeffrey Balurdo” (in Antonio’s Revenge), John Marston (1934) (Ricks 220–21).
Title The Hollow Men: Ernest Dowson was suggested as the source of this title, in a review of Dowson’s Poetical Works, TLS 3 Jan 1935 (shown to be by Geoffrey Tillotson when collected in his Essays in Criticism and Research, 1942). TSE replied: “I do not think that I got the title The Hollow Men from Dowson. There is a romance of William Morris called The Hollow Land. There is also a poem of Mr. Kipling called The Broken Men. I combined the two”, Dowson’s Poems (1935); see description of ts2 in Textual History, and, for more of TSE’s letter to the TLS, see note to V 9. Again: “I could never have thought of this title but for Kipling’s poem The Broken Men. One of the broken men has turned up recently in my work, and may be seen at this time on the stage of the Cambridge Theatre”, “The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling” (1959), referring to Claverton in The Elder Statesman, which ran at London’s Cambridge Theatre Sept–Nov 1958. TSE had previously combined Morris with Kipling in Bacchus and Ariadne 11: “The winds beyond the world”, where Morris’s title The Wood Beyond the World (1894) meets Kipling’s phrase “The Wind that blows between the Worlds”, which comes three times in Tomlinson (1892). TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes Morris’s book, and TSE included Kipling’s poem in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. For Kipling’s A Counting-Out Song, see headnote to V.
Julius Caesar IV ii: “But hollow men, like horses hot at hand, | Make gallant show and promise of their mettle” (see note to V 7–8). Julius Caesar had been one of TSE’s set texts at school (Smith Academy yearbooks, 1902–03). Hollow: Conrad: “he was hollow at the core”, Heart of Darkness pt. 3 (Gardner 110). Hesse: “the decent, highly respectable magistrate and the other representatives of the bourgeois · · · are shabby, hollow, worthless”, In Sight of Chaos 16 (see note to The Waste Land [V] 366–76). TSE to I. A. Richards, 18 May 1934: “Records arrived. One side is The HALLOW Men, sic.”
On the oddity of two epigraphs to the poem appearing on different pages, see Ricks 218.
Epigraph on section-title page (1925+) Mistah Kurtz—he dead: the unadopted epigraph for The Waste Land (see note) was taken from earlier in the same passage of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness pt. 3:
[Poem I 79 · Textual History II 418]
“One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.’ The light was within a foot
of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, ‘Oh, nonsense!’ and stood over him as if transfixed.
“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—
“‘The horror! The horror!’
“I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt—
“‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead.’”
Whether or not Conrad knew its author’s identity, he had probably read TSE’s Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, for John Quinn sent him a copy on publication (NYPL: Quinn Papers). Conrad wrote a Foreword to Edward Garnett’s Turgenev (1917), of which TSE wrote an initialled review in Egoist Dec 1917. TSE to Polly Tandy, 12 June 1948: “I don’t identify the name of Mr. Otto Kurz: the only Kurz I know died on the Congo.”
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 95