Concetti Chiave
- The poem "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot, written between 1923 and 1925, explores themes of spiritual emptiness and lack of identity.
- Eliot combines elements from "The Empty Earth" by William Morris and "The Broken Men" by Rudyard Kipling, creating a title that reflects his characteristic style of synthesis.
- The "hollow men" represent individuals devoid of soul and purpose, akin to Dante's depiction of the spiritually dead and emotionally void.
- The hollow men are not seen as malicious but as passive and ineffective, mirroring the existential crisis of humanity post-World War I.
- The poem's style resembles a funeral lamentation, emphasizing the hollow men's detachment from the living while highlighting their static, unchanging existence.
"The Hollow Men" - Thomas Stearns Eliot – Summary: Analysis, critical comment, themes and main features of the poem
The poem was composed in London by T.S. Eliot between 1923 and 1925, after the writing of the major work "The waste land".
The title of the poem comes from the fusion (so we notice an effective contaminatio by T.S. Eliot, who was often inspired by other works) of the titles of two works: "The Empty Earth" by Morris and "The Broken Men" by Kipling.
The protagonists of the poem are hollow men, or men without a soul, with "the head full of straw": hollow men have no personality, faith, humanity, or characteristics that distinguish them from each other; They simply roam around as ghosts on earth.
The figure of hollow men is modeled on that of the Dantesque ignorant: in fact, Eliot writes that hollow men can interact only with the dead, of which they share the condition of spiritual death.
Hollow men are remembered by those who died not as evil people, but as puppets, unable to act and to experience feelings, the objective correlative of a humanity who in the 19 th century lost the sense of its existence and allowed it to take place Immanent tragedy, or the First World War.
From a stylistic point of view, text has the characteristics of funeral lamentation: the hollow men who speak are no longer part of the world of the living and seem to turn to someone away from them in time and space.
Domande da interrogazione
- Qual è il significato principale dei "hollow men" nel poema di T.S. Eliot?
- Come si collega il poema "The Hollow Men" alla storia del XX secolo?
- Quali sono le caratteristiche stilistiche del poema?
I "hollow men" rappresentano uomini senza anima, privi di personalità, fede e umanità, simili a fantasmi che vagano sulla terra, riflettendo una condizione di morte spirituale.
Il poema riflette la perdita del senso dell'esistenza umana nel XIX secolo e l'avvento della tragedia imminente, come la Prima Guerra Mondiale, rappresentando un'umanità incapace di agire e provare sentimenti.
Il testo ha le caratteristiche di una lamentazione funebre, con i "hollow men" che parlano come se non facessero più parte del mondo dei vivi, senza dettagli o sospetti, esprimendo la loro condizione immutabile di non-vita.
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