T·S·Eliot and His Poetry

陈菲菲

    According to an interview of Eliot in 1959, he mentioned that The Hollow Men “originated out of separate poems.” That is a kind of making the whole of the poem that he was used to: doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, and altering them. It may account for some of the apparent discrepancies between the sections of the poem that cause local difficulties of interpretation, but shared metrical and emotional characteristics of the sequences weld each into a coherent poetic unity.（Michael Herbert 1982：35） The Hollow Men was published in 1925 when it was for Eliot a period of absence from the bank, having just suffered a nervous breakdown which was generated by his family and himself. As we all know, the publication of The Waste Land in 1922 was a great shock in the literature world, which also signified that the creative career of Eliot entered into a mature state. After that, Eliot ever tried to write some play but failed in it, so that he had to rewrite the poems in which field he was excel. The theme of “hollowness” presented in the poem directly relates to his psychological condition at the time, a condition known at the time as “aboulie”. In Eliot’s New Life, Lyndall Gorden found that the unhappy marriage between Eliot and his first wife Vivien took a very essential effect on his spiritual life, and her physical and psychological state induced him to know the emptiness and debasement of human kind. . (刘燕2005：10) Particularly, in 1925, their conflicts reached a climax.

In 1927，he accepted the Baptist and became an Christian. In The Hollow Men, the loss of faith, loss of belief in themselves is what has happened to those men whose voices have dried up and been made “quiet and meaningless”. In the “broken jaw of our lost Kingdom,” they “avoid speech”. On the other hand, the religious theme of this poem is mainly represented throughout the debasement of the hollow men through the rejection of God and their despair through consequent guilt. In part I, the poet describes the living state of the hollow men, “shape without form, shade without color,/Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.” They are like the spiritual state of shades in Inferno II. Neither heaven nor hell will let them past its gates, where even struggle is futile.

References

1. Eliot, T﹒S：The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S.Eliot:1909-1950. [C] London: Faber and Faber Limited,1969.

2. 张剑：《空心人》与T﹒S﹒艾略特的思想发展. [J] 国外文学，1998，1.