Decline of the West

“The Hollow Men” is often read as a comment on European culture after World War I, at the time of Eliot’s writing. The Great War rocked the entire culture to its foundations, calling into question the ideas of progress and enlightenment core to the European sense of identity. The notion that European countries had advanced to a civilized state beyond war was shown to be “hollow” by the expansive violence of a war many of Eliot’s generation found barbaric. The people who still cling to these notions of European idealism after the war are Eliot's central focus of his social critique; Eliot portrays them as in denial and as “hollow” as their ideals.

The first line of the epigraph provides an interpretive touchstone for the poem. “Mistah Kurtz–he dead” comes from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, at the...