Much like his modernist masterpiece The Waste Land, Eliot's "The Hollow Men" can only really be understood against the historical and cultural backdrop of the years following the First World War.

The conclusion of this cataclysmic conflict, at that time the bloodiest conflict in human history, precipitated the sweeping away of many of the old cultural, moral, and religious certainties that had largely underpinned Western civilization for centuries. As a consequence, Western culture became fragmented and diffuse, no longer able to perform its vital role of providing the basis of a common, transnational heritage.

It is this cultural malaise that Eliot deals with in "The Hollow Men." The eponymous men can be seen as an extended metaphor for the decline of Western culture—or, to be more specific, European culture—in the aftermath of the First World War. The hollow men are empty because they've been divested of their humanity by the War. And because European culture and civilization have fractured, they have nothing upon which they can draw in order to restore that humanity.

To be sure, the hollow men can try and preserve what's left of the detritus of European culture, but they are so inert, incapable of doing anything, that they are unable to do so. At the same time, they have a profound impact on the world around them, despite their chronic inertia.

The barren landscape in which they live, the "dead land," the "cactus land," is a perfect reflection of their emptiness. This landscape can be seen to symbolize the paucity of cultural achievement in the years following the First World War, a time when so many people have abandoned the old cultural certainties to worship false gods, as represented in the poem by the raised stone images receiving "The Supplication of a dead man's hand."

This is undoubtedly a reference to the fragmented culture I referred to earlier, the diffuse nature of which keeps people apart, just like the hollow men, who are incapable of coming into contact with each other.