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The Hollow Men (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

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This poem of emptiness, “The Hollow Men,” opens with a double epigraph, one from the novelist Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and one from the traditional children's request for a penny on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5. The former seems intended to draw the reader to Conrad's short masterpiece and to the announcement of the death of Mr. Kurtz—perhaps the ultimate hollow man—to Charlie Marlow, the first narrator of that work. (Marlow had observed of London that it, too, was once one of the dark places of the world.) The latter epigraph also involves light and...

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