Editing T. S. Eliot (section)

==="The Hollow Men"===
{{Main|The Hollow Men}}

"The Hollow Men" appeared in 1925. For the critic [[Edmund Wilson]], it marked "The nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in 'The Waste Land'."<ref>[[Edmund Wilson|Wilson, Edmund]]. "Review of Ash Wednesday", ''New Republic'', 20 August 1930.</ref> It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. Similar to Eliot's other works, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary. Post-war Europe under the [[Treaty of Versailles]] (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.<ref>See, for instance, the biographically oriented work of one of Eliot's editors and major critics, Ronald Schuchard.</ref>

[[Allen Tate]] perceived a shift in Eliot's method, writing, "The mythologies disappear altogether in 'The Hollow Men'." This is a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliot's early work, to say little of the modern English mythology—the "Old [[Guy Fawkes]]" of the [[Gunpowder Plot]]—or the colonial and [[Agrarianism|agrarian]] mythos of [[Joseph Conrad]] and [[James George Frazer]], which, at least for reasons of textual history, echo in ''The Waste Land''.<ref>Grant, Michael (ed.). ''T. S. Eliot: the Critical Heritage''. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.</ref> The "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in fine form.<ref>" 'Ulysses', Order, and Myth", ''Selected Essays'' T. S. Eliot (orig 1923).</ref> "The Hollow Men" contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion: {{blockquote|''This is the way the world ends''<br />''Not with a bang but a whimper.''}}