Mistah Kurtz–he dead / A penny for the Old Guy. (Epigraph)

Importance: The epigraph foregrounds the techniques and themes of “The Hollow Men,” expanding the scope of the poem beyond itself while acclimating the reader to Eliot’s technique of combining fragments to fashion a unified work. In this case, Eliot combines a line from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness with a phrase children say on the English holiday Guy Fawkes Day. Beginning with a death situates the reader in the afterlife, while introducing the theme of the effigy grounds the afterlife here on earth, where some element of a person can persist after their death. It is this version of the afterlife Eliot will play with in the very first stanza of the poem to describe his main characters. Moreover, the reference to Kurtz is a powerful symbol of the false promises of European enlightenment depicted in Heart of...