Poems, including ash-wednesday

pp. 168-184

in: F. B. Pinion, A T. S. Eliot companion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1986

Abstract

All but the last of the five sections of "The Hollow Men" were published in the winter of 1924–5, the first in Commerce (Paris), the second and fourth in The Criterion, and all three of these in The Dial. Together with "Eyes that last I saw in tears", and "The wind sprang up at four o"clock", the third section ("This is the dead land") appeared under the title of "Doris's Dream Songs' in November 1924. Early images of wind, dry grass, rats' feet, and broken glass indicate the link with The Waste Land, but the poem as a whole is more forward-looking, and most of it seems to have been written after the publication of that work. Some time elapsed before Eliot realized that the four parts, together with a fifth ("Here we go round the prickly pear"), were best presented as a sequence, and as such "The Hollow Men" appeared in Poems (1925).