“He Do the [Poet] in Different Voices”: Eyes, You, and I in “The Hollow Men”

Abstract

Seeking a responsible reading of The Waste Land is aided by attending to its relation to “The Hollow Men,” published as a whole three years later. Here, too, tonal shifts are frequent and critical. The later poem continues much of the earlier (Guy Fawkes, for example, representing aborted efforts that “The Hollow Men” also emphasizes in the way “the Shadow” “comes between” various efforts). “The Hollow Men” does, however, veer from The Waste Land in proposing the necessity of facing “the eyes” capable of revealing the darkness of the human heart.