Eliot in 1926. Photography by Henry Ware Eliot.
“The Hollow Men,” as we have it now, was first published in T.S. Eliot’s Poems: 1909-1925. It is the final poem in the collection, appearing directly after The Waste Land.
To say it was first published in 1925 is a little misleading. The third section (of the five) appeared in the 1924 miscellany The Chapbook. It was part of a grouping of three lyrics under the title “Doris’s Dream Songs.” (Most of the contributors to The Chapbook are forgotten. Anna Wickham—who hung herself in 1947—had pride of place with four poems. It also included a drawing by Theo Scharf, who later served as a war artist in Hitler’s Germany.)
What became the first section of “The Hollow Men” was published next—in the Winter 1924/25 edition of the French literary magazine Commerce. Sections two and four were published in the January 1925 issue of Criterion. Then all three of these sections—that is, one, two, and four—were republished in the March 1925 Dial. Finally, sections one to four appeared with a fifth, which had never been published, in Poems in November.
I mention all of this because it reminds us that “The Hollow Men” is like a song—connected by motif rather than by a tight narrative. In fact, it is hard to “get” Eliot unless you understand how central music is to his work.
An illustration from Eliot’s “A Song for Simeon” (1928)
Eliot loved music—ragtime and vaudeville. He would go to musical hall shows regularly in Boston. He and his first wife, Vivienne, would roll the rug of their apartment back in the evening so they could put on a record and dance—at least early on in the marriage.
All of Eliot’s major poems have some connection to music. “Prufrock” is quite literally a “song.” The original title of The Waste Land was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” and many early critics compared the structure of the poem to the structure of jazz. Several years ago, Cynthia Haven collected a few articles on Eliot’s debt to Beethoven in The Four Quartets. The most intriguing was Katie Mitchell’s piece in The Guardian:
In 1994, on a dusty bookshelf at a friend's house, I stumbled across an old tape recording of Ted Hughes reading my favourite poem, TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. I was struck by the power of hearing the poem read aloud. When you read it to yourself silently, you can appreciate Eliot’s use of alliteration, or the way in which he cuts the cloth of his ideas in different metrical patterns - but the appreciation is cerebral. When you hear it spoken, the musical impact of the language, metres and rhymes crystallises the meaning and releases the emotion. The more I listened to Hughes' recording, the more I became convinced that the poem was written to be read out loud, and that hearing it made the material more accessible. I began to wonder how you could make it into a live performance. With this in mind, I approached Stephen Dillane, one the few actors I knew who would not be daunted by the scale and potential loneliness of the undertaking. And so, three years ago, rehearsals began, fitted around our other work commitments. It was only by chance that we discovered - in Lyndall Gordon’s book on Eliot's later career, Eliot's New Life - that the poem was inspired by one of Beethoven’s late string quartets. Once the initial connection had been made between the two pieces, I started to research them both, with a view to working out how to put them together. The idea of an evening that somehow combined a reading of the poem with a performance of the string quartet was born.
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