Living Will-Living Will Forms

Heres a virtual movie of the celebrated reader of poetry Robert Speaight reading definitively “The Hollow Men” by the great TS Eliot. The Hollow Men (1925) is a major poem by TS Eliot. Its themes are, like many of Eliot’s poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognised to be concerned most with post-World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised: compare “Gerontion”), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, and, as some critics argue, Eliot’s own failed marriage (Vivienne Eliot may have been having an affair with Bertrand Russell. The poem is divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines. Eliot wrote that he produced the title “The Hollow Men” by combining the titles of the romance “The Hollow Land” by William Morris with the poem “The Broken Men” by Rudyard Kipling:[2] but it is possible that this is one of Eliot’s many constructed allusions, and that the title originates more transparently from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or from the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness who is referred to as a “hollow sham” and “hollow at the core”. The two epigraphs to the poem, “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” and “A penny for the Old Guy”, are allusions to Conrad’s character and to Guy Fawkes, attempted arsonist of the English house of Parliament, and his straw-man effigy that is burned each year in the United Kingdom on Guy Fawkes Night. Some critics read the poem as told from three perspectives, each representing a phase of the …

Erin

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