Literary Allusions in Eliots The Hollow Men :: Eliot The Hollow Men Essays

Literary Allusions in Eliots The Hollow Men Scholars have long endeavored to identify the sources of dissimilar images in T. S. Eliots work, so densely layered with literary allusions. As Eliot himself noted in his essay Philip Massinger (1920), One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Im full-blown poets imitate, mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. In Eliots poem The Hollow Men, several sources have been posited for the hollow custody . . . the stuffed men / leaning together . . . filled with straw (lines 1-2). B. C. Southam notes three that the hollow . . . stuffed men are reminiscent of the effigies burned in celebration of Guy Fawkes twenty-four hour period that gibe to Valerie Eliot, the poet had in mind the marionette in Stravinskys Petrouchka and finally, that the straw-stuffed effigies are associated with harvest rituals celebrating the death of the fertility god or Fisher King.(n1) In 1963, some old age in the first place Southams summary, John Vickery had proffered an interpretation similar to the third point mentioned. He noted that the opening lines of The Hollow Men with their image of straw-filled creatures, recalls The Golden Boughs account of the straw-man who represents the dead musical note of fertility that revives in the spring when the apple trees begin to blossom.(n2) Whereas Eliot may well have had any or all of these ideas in mind, I suggest that at that place is yet another connection to be made, namely between Eliots hollow . . . stuffed men and the Roman ritual of the Argei. In 1922, a few years before Eliot wrote The Hollow Men, W. Warde Fowler described the particulars of this ritual, which was to him a fascinating puzzle and the first curiosity that enticed him into the study of Roman religion, in his book Roman Religious Experience.(n3) The rite according to Fowler occurs each year on the ides of May, which is in my view rather magical than religious, though the ancients themselves looked upon it as a kind of purification, namely the casting into the Tiber from the Pons Sublicius of twenty-four or twenty-seven straw puppets by the Vestal Virgins in the presence of the magistrates and pontifices. Recently an attempt has been made by Wissowa to prove that this strange ceremony was not primitive, yet simply a case of substitution of puppets for real human victims as late as the age of the Punic wars.