Populist poetics
This brings us to the opening stanza of The Hollow Men, where Eliot presents aspiring religio-nationalist torchbearers with an effigy of liberal secularism, ready for immolation.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat’s feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.The scene is reminiscent of the “desolate plain lying between Hell’s portal and the river Acheron” in Dante’s Divine Comedy. When Dante asks his guide why the souls here lament so bitterly, he is told that it is because they were, while on earth, neither spiritually alive nor spiritually dead, neither good nor evil.
As such, they are forbidden from entering Hell proper. They are damned to an eternity of ineffectual fence-sitting, so to speak. Eliot ratifies the assignation elsewhere, when he determines: “So far as we are human […] it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.”
[…]
The Hollow Men disregarded many of the liberal shibboleths of its time. In doing so, it communed with a populist, religio-nationalist mindset that was beginning to establish a foothold. One hundred years on, it is a poem that feels very much of our time.