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

Literary Allusions in Eliots The Hollow manpower Scholars have long endeavored to identify the sources of various images in T. S. Eliots work, so thick layered with literary allusions. As Eliot himself noted in his essay Philip Massinger (1920), integrity of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal large(p) poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into roundthing better, or at least something different. In Eliots poem The Hollow Men, several sources have been posited for the hollow custody . . . the stuffed men / leaning together . . . filled with straw (lines 1-2). B. C. Southam notes three that the hollow . . . stuffed men are reminiscent of the effigies burned in celebration of Guy Fawkes daylight that according to Valerie Eliot, the poet had in mind the marionette in Stravinskys Petrouchka and finally, that the straw-stuffed effigies are associated with product rituals celebrating the death of th e fertility god or Fisher King.(n1) In 1963, some courses before Southams summary, John Vickery had proffered an interpretation similar to the third full stop mentioned. He noted that the opening lines of The Hollow Men with their image of straw-filled creatures, recalls The Golden Boughs sexual conquest of the straw-man who represents the dead spirit of fertility that revives in the spring when the apple trees demoralise to blossom.(n2) Whereas Eliot may well have had any or all of these ideas in mind, I suggest that there is yet another 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 study of Roman religion, in his book Roman Religious Experience.(n3) The rite according to Fowler occurs each year on the ides of May, w hich is in my view rather magical than 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 presence of the magistrates and pontifices. Recently an judge has been made by Wissowa to prove that this strange ceremony was not primitive, moreover simply a case of substitution of puppets for real human victims as late as the age of the Punic wars.