[HN Gopher] "The Hollow Men" at 100
___________________________________________________________________
"The Hollow Men" at 100
Author : flanged
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-08-09 20:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (prufrock.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (prufrock.substack.com)
| hyperhello wrote:
| The Hollow Men is from 1925. Try to read it like a beatnik poet,
| world-weary and confident, with finger snaps and bongo drums or a
| jazz orchestra in the background. Eliot was a fascinating fellow
| traveler person. My favorite site for his poems is here:
| https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
| lemonberry wrote:
| I find conjuring my inner Maynard G. Krebs helps a lot.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Yes, a funny character and a spot-on parody of the genre, but
| I found it really insightful to watch some interviews with
| Jack Kerouac to get a feel for his personality. It's a bit
| different from our rosy-eyed view of that era. He was harder
| and harsher than we want to imagine.
| lemonberry wrote:
| Absolutely. I still enjoy his books.
| keiferski wrote:
| I recommend the same thing for the actual beatniks themselves
| like Kerouac. You have to read it like spoken poetry, not
| merely written. This song uses lines from one of his stories
| and when set to music it fits perfectly.
|
| https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdf...
|
| https://youtu.be/CMMBP19ma60?si=lB6gzWBtaZp2f_Oy
| multjoy wrote:
| He was also a virulent anti-semite
| alkyon wrote:
| Like Wagner and lots of other artists around that time.
| Agatha Christie's most famous novel? - Ten Little Niggers.
| Jean Genet was a convicted criminal. I try to separate the
| work from the artist, even if it's difficult.
| multjoy wrote:
| OP doesn't even acknowledge it.
|
| Eliot chose, in 1948, when the Holocaust was common
| knowledge, to reprint a poem that contains the line:
|
| >On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles. The
| jew is underneath the lot.
|
| That isn't a poet following a common zeitgeist, that is a
| deliberate, provocative act.
| danans wrote:
| Which was sadly not uncommon in those days. The Nazi party
| had a significant following in both the US and the UK at that
| time.
| multjoy wrote:
| That doesn't make it any better. They also had significant
| opposition.
| danans wrote:
| Indeed, they had opposition. However, the way we have
| been taught history has been laundered to make us think
| that Nazi ideology never had a significant base of
| support outside of Germany, when the truth was that it
| was not only significant, but segregated American society
| under Jim Crow was in several ways a model for the Nazis.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| US treatment of migrant workers under the Bracero program
| and US usage of Zyklon B on migrant workers as a
| delousing agent directly inspired Nazis. This came to a
| head at the so-called bath riots in 1917:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Bath_riots
|
| This has come up a couple times before on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38552760
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381708
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40382627
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40646876
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| The beatniks were most active in the 50s, maybe as early as the
| mid 40s, but definitely not 1925.
| danans wrote:
| Though their genres and styles were completely different, the
| timing of his work, its reflections on the trauma of WW1, and
| then his conversion to conservative Catholicism reminds me more
| of Tolkien.
| dhosek wrote:
| He wasn't actually Catholic-Catholic, but Anglo-Catholic, a
| faction within the Anglican church which revived a lot of
| Catholic liturgical practices without entering into communion
| with Rome.
| zabzonk wrote:
| For those interested in Eliot, the BBC has a lot of stuff
| (criticism, recordings, etc.) in various places. Just search for
| "bbc ts eliot".
| strken wrote:
| Here's my favourite reading:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=nwcP3NOCeiE.
| rikroots wrote:
| I was going to respond saying how much I dislike the way the
| narrator reads the poem - like a vicar 45 minutes into an
| overlong Sunday sermon, as bored as the congregation - then I
| saw the OP article included a link to Eliot reading his own
| poem. And that one sounds like the vicar now entering the third
| hour of his overlong Sunday sermon. So I have to agree: your
| favourite reading is the better reading of the poem.
| every wrote:
| This is the poem I used for speech contests in high school...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-08-10 23:01 UTC)