Literary Allusions in Eliots The Hollow Men :: Eliot The Hollow Men Essays

Literary Allusions in Eliots The vacuous Men Scholars have long endeavored to identify the sources of various come acrosss in T. S. Eliots work, so densely layered with literary allusions. As Eliot himself noted in his essay Philip Massinger (1920), One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Im produce poets imitate, mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. In Eliots poem The Hollow Men, several sources have been posited for the holla men . . . the stuffed men / leaning together . . . filled with straw (lines 1-2). B. C. Southam notes trey that the hollow . . . stuffed men are reminiscent of the effigies burned in jubilance of Guy Fawkes Day that consort to Valerie Eliot, the poet had in mind the marionette in Stravinskys Petrouchka and finally, that the straw-stuffed effigies are associated with harvest rituals celebrating the death of the fertility god or fishe r King.(n1) In 1963, some years before Southams summary, John Vickery had proffered an interpretation corresponding to the third point mentioned. He noted that the opening lines of The Hollow Men with their image of straw-filled creatures, recalls The Golden Boughs account of the straw-man who represents the dead spirit of fertility that revives in the ring when the apple trees begin to blossom.(n2) Whereas Eliot may well have had any or all of these ideas in mind, I suggest that there is yet other connection to be made, namely between Eliots hollow . . . stuffed men and the Roman ritual of the Argei. In 1922, a few years before Eliot wrote The Hollow Men, W. Warde Fowler described the particulars of this ritual, which was to him a fascinating puzzle and the first curiosity that enticed him into the canvas of Roman religion, in his book Roman Religious Experience.(n3) The rite according to Fowler occurs each year on the ides of May, which is in my view rather wizardly tha n religious, though the ancients themselves looked upon it as a kind of purification, namely the casting into the Tiber from the Pons Sublicius of twenty-four or twenty-seven straw puppets by the Vestal Virgins in the straw man of the magistrates and pontifices. Recently an attempt has been made by Wissowa to prove that this strange Lords Supper was not primitive, but simply a case of substitution of puppets for very human victims as late as the age of the Punic wars.