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ImperfectFALLENangel - T S Eliot's poetry is featured repeatedly in "The Taking" by Dean Koontz. As a result of reading this book, I began to entertain the idea of reading some of Eliot's work. I thought he was a decent poet; I was wrong. He has a style to rival that of Edgar Allan Poe. This is the very DEFINITION of the term 'masterpiece'.
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- From guest eamarti (contact)
One of my favourite poems of all time. I remember reading it in high school and it was only recently that I understood what the hollow men were. Has amazing depth and very clever use of language.Love the way he uses repetiition to enhance his point - brilliant.
Read more →One of my favourite poems of all time. I remember reading it in high school and it was only recently that I understood what the hollow men were. Has amazing depth and very clever use of language.Love the way he uses repetiition to enhance his point - brilliant.
SeanJ - Good call, that's along the lines of most critical interpretation of Heart Of Darkness (though I could site sources and make an arguement against it). Either way, I think the footnote is itself inaccurate through its speculation. I'll take care of it.
SeanJ - OP Researcher.
SeanJ - OP Researcher.
- I take extreme exception to the first foot note regarding "Mistah Kurtz". That is a complete misreading of "Heart of Darkness" (a work of genius if there ever was one). Kurtz was not corrupted by "primitive" Africans because of his weakness. In reading the work, it is clear that Kurtz's own "civilization" is indeed what is barbaric. Pay attention to how whites treat the Africans throughout the book. Indeed, Kurtz's behavior is just an extreme extension of what the whites were doing in the Belgian Congo in general, and it was not an exception to an otherwise "civilized" endeavor. This is one of Conrad's main points, and this is one of the huge ideas that FF Coppala captured so masterfully in the film adaptation "Apocolypse Now".
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Touchof1der - I have not read this piece in such a very long time. I am still just as entralled with it today as I was when I first read it. I had completely forgotten this!
♥ Kimberly
♥ Kimberly
Mr. Numi Who- - My Impression:
People lost in the world of commerce become 'quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass' and when they speak it is with empty mind, as in 'rat's feet over broken glass, in our dry cellar'... and Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'- very poetic prose...
Edited on Jan 28, 7:05 p.m. because '...of a penchant for fiddling...'.
Read more →People lost in the world of commerce become 'quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass' and when they speak it is with empty mind, as in 'rat's feet over broken glass, in our dry cellar'... and Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'- very poetic prose...
Edited on Jan 28, 7:05 p.m. because '...of a penchant for fiddling...'.
- Read this in the 10th grade and loved it.. especially hearing T.S. Eliot himself reading it.. we never let that go as a laugh... He says it in monotone but when he gets to the prickly pear.. well, we all had a good laugh. Love this poem. One of my all time faves
*~Rosey~*
Read more →*~Rosey~*
Silverarm - After reading Heart of Darkness, my English professor was definitely trying to push this poem on this. Completely unnecessary, as I'm a huge fan of Eliot's poetry anyway... I just couldn't pass by this poem without throwing up a huge shout-out to the author of my favorite poem (not this one, but "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")
Read more → - I can remember reading this as a literature assignment in my senior year of high school or either my first year of college.
There is so much depth in this poem that it needed much explaination for me then, and now. I am glad to see the authors comments. They help to anaylize the poem. The form and structure is that of free verse, and is well formatted for the rendering of such a wondrous word tapestry. This poem has inspired me to write something with this type of depth. Let the muse surface. I thank you Mr. Eliot for your superb guidence.
Read more →There is so much depth in this poem that it needed much explaination for me then, and now. I am glad to see the authors comments. They help to anaylize the poem. The form and structure is that of free verse, and is well formatted for the rendering of such a wondrous word tapestry. This poem has inspired me to write something with this type of depth. Let the muse surface. I thank you Mr. Eliot for your superb guidence.
Myron Lysenko - i remember doing this poem in high school when i was a teenager...many years ago...the final section is the one i remember most vividly from those days ...& readiung it again tonight, saw just what a wonderful piece of poetry it is...
thanks for rekindling this...prufrock was my favourite poem for many years...
Read more →thanks for rekindling this...prufrock was my favourite poem for many years...
Judas Denied - Eliot rocks!!! That said, I have to say the fifth section of this poem is what really truly endears it to me. The somewhat apathetic, nonchalant tone at the beginning that drifts into madness is what really grabs me in this piece. The last two lines are by far(in my opinion) the most profound things I have ever read. I first read this piece in eleventh grade and have since committed it to memory. There is something in it that rings so true to me that it almost makes me choke. /"We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men."/ Beautiful to me, and his sources for this piece only make the abstract nature of it more concrete.
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T S Eliot Follow
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot, a brick manufacturer, and Charlotte (Stearns) Eliot, who was active in social reform and was herself a not-untalented poet. Both parents were descended from families that had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. William Greenleaf Eliot, the poet's paternal grandfather, had, after his graduation from Harvard in the 1830s, moved to St. Louis, where he became a Unitarian minister, but the New England connection was closely maintained--especially, during Eliot's youth, through the family's summer home on the Atlantic coast
Read more → Browse all Famous poems > By T S Eliot
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I've been coming back to this poem for years and I never could figure out what its even trying to talk. I gotta talk through this, and I don't think anyone that I know would care, so I will leave it here.
I) the stuff of life, the day to day, is without meaning. yeah, got it - every emo band ever.
II) stuff that bothers me in the day to day doesn't even register in like... the legacy of history. The eyes, the looks of others that I fear from other people are here replaced with the sun. I don't know about some stone mason in ancient Greece having a hard time standing up to a bully, but I do see the work that he left: a broken column. The sunlight illuminates it for these thousands of years. So salvation is to reject the day to day and take up deliberate acts to solidify myself in history. yeah, got it - every politician ever. Foreboding: even stars fade.
III) It is intentionally unclear if this dead land is the temperal "life" of (I) or the eternal "death" of (II) because they are actually the same in different time scales. The worshiped raised stones are the very same that were cast as salvation in (II) as the columns.
IV) This kind of drives it home. There are NO eyes. Even the stars fade. We are without voices in death's dream kingdom as the broken columns collapse and even the stars cease to cast their light upon them and there remain anyway none to see it happen. The idea that we can be saved by living for this "eternal" space, and ever here the implication of a spiritual pursuit, is itself the dream of hollowness.
V) No: the subject, the self, the soul lives neither here nor in deaths kingdom. Only its shadow can be seen, confined in the space of unfulfilled desire. The emptiness is the meaning, and there is no other.
I've always thought this poem was a little depressing but, and I'm going to avoid swearing here, but golly jee flying casperton if that is not the most depressingly gorgeously lonely and freeing idea it is possible for a human to think.
thanks for reading.
OAD
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together"
---- As the poet says
We are the hollow men with empty head (no worthwhile knowledge)
We are the stuffed men with heads crammed full of meaningless facts.
leaning together we can learn together, and your analysis is a start.
Thank you
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
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.
Keep going