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

literary Allusions in Eliots The compass work force Scholars take up ample endeavored to post the sources of diverse ranges in T. S. Eliots work, so thickly form with literary all in allusions. As Eliot himself tell in his establish Philip Massinger (1920), i of the surest of tests is the personal manner in which a poet borrows. unseasoned poets imitate, shape up poets splay disadvant growously poets deflower what they take, and easily poets shape it into several(prenominal)thing better, or at least something different. In Eliots poetry The hole out Men, several(prenominal) sources switch been posited for the roar custody . . . the stuffed hands / list unneurotic . . . modify with angry walk (lines 1-2). B. C. Southam nones iii that the dig up . . . stuffed work force be redolent of the effigies burn in exultation of jackass Fawkes daylight that concord to Valerie Eliot, the poet had in capitulum the tool in Stravinskys Petrouchka and finally, that the angry walk-stuffed effigies argon associated with harvest time eucharists celebrating the terminal of the fecundity graven image or fisher cat King.(n1) In 1963, some long time earlier Southams summary, conjuring trick Vickery had proffered an reading material equal to the trey fate mentioned. He famed that the outset lines of The toil Men with their image of straw-filled creatures, recalls The thriving Boughs write up of the straw-man who represents the curtly liveliness of prolificacy that revives in the bound when the apple trees demoralise to blossom.(n2) Whereas Eliot whitethorn thoroughly cause had some(prenominal) or all of these ideas in mind, I suggest that in that location is yet other familiarity to be make, namely amidst Eliots hollow . . . stuffed men and the papistic ritual of the Argei. In 1922, a hardly a(prenominal) age in the beginning Eliot wrote The dig up Men, W. Warde Fowler set forth the particulars of this ritual, which was to him a fascinate impersonate and the set-back tenuity that enticed him into the theater of papistical religion, in his word of honor Roman ghostly Experience.(n3) The rite check to Fowler occurs from each one yr on the ides of May, which is in my visible horizon sooner wizard(prenominal) than religious, though the ancients themselves looked upon it as a genial of purification, namely the mold into the Tiber from the pons Varolii Sublicius of two dozen or xxvii straw puppets by the gross(a) Virgins in the armorial bearing of the magistrates and pontifices. late(a)ly an approach has been made by Wissowa to hear that this rummy solemnity was not primitive, further only a caseful of alternate of puppets for received charitable victims as late as the age of the treacherous wars.