T. S. Eliot: The Hollow Men

"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."

Please join us for a discussion and live reading of T. S. Eliot's 1925 poem The Hollow Men.

"The Hollow Men" (1925) is a poem by the modernist writer T. S. Eliot. Like much of his work, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary, concerned with post–World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles, hopelessness, religious conversion, redemption and, some critics argue, his failing marriage with Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot. It was published two years before Eliot converted to Anglicanism.

Divided into five parts, the poem is 98 lines long. Eliot's New York Times obituary in 1965 identified the final four as "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English".

Online Text Link:
https://poets.org/poem/hollow-men