Hollow Men ? "April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land". So wrote Thomas Stearns Eliot in the opening line of The Waste Land (1922), one of the most intriguing and famous poems in English Literature. Considered ‘ground breaking’ and ‘important’ when it was first published (although barely anyone knew what it was really all about), The Waste Land is essentially an attempt to sketch out and describe the hollow and meaningless nature of modern life. Hence, within its stanzas, the streets of London are populated by the walking dead who, with Eliot’s earlier Prufrock (1917) have "measured out their lives in coffee spoons" - A crowd flowed over London bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many, Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet... "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"   The world Eliot describes is one which has eschewed any reference to that beyond itself and which has (supposably) explained the mysteries of life with reason and science and located its meaning in political and economic philosophies (the Capitalist or Communist brand of the brotherhood of man). Eliot was greatly influenced by Joseph Conrad’s earlier novel Heart of Darkness, a book I was initially dismayed to find on the High School curriculum but have been grateful ever since that I was compelled to read. Heart of Darkness tells the story of the ivory trader Col. Kurtz whose journey up the Congo River and into the untamed heart of the African continent functions as a metaphor for the parallel journey into the darkness inherent within his own self. The wilderness into which Kurtz travels brings him into a world that is completely without any reference to God and / or religion and where there are no moral ‘signposts’ to guide him - precisely the sort of world that was being created as Eliot wrote. Kurtz, who had come to Africa with the paternalistic missionary zeal of European colonialism armed with a quasi-religious idealism and the need to make a profit (embodying the Enlightenment ideal as it is expressed in Western Capitalism), finds himself entirely incapable of transcending the powerful allure of "the darkness." The narrator, Marlowe, explains; It had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know,  things of which he had no conception, till he took counsel with this great  solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed  loudly within him because he was hollow at the core." For Kurtz, the journey ends not in the triumph of a superior socio-political system and with the imposition of rational humanism as so many of Eliot and Conrad’s contemporaries were enthusiastically predicting at the time, but in a meaninglessness and despair summed up by his dyeing cry - "the horror, the horror." Like so many others gifted with creative ability, both Eliot and Conrad were able to see that all of the hopes and expectations of life in the modern world, all of the great advances in science, technology, and human knowledge, all of the political causes and systems devised by humans, were leading - not to the Utopian society the prophets of progress were predicting - but to an awful, Godless nothingness. Eliot, still profoundly influenced by Heart of Darkness (as acknowledged by the epithet - "Mistuh Kurtz - He Dead"!) summed up his generation just a few years after the writing of The Waste Land like this; We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless. (from The Hollow Men) T. S. Eliot was to find an answer to the crisis of meaning he felt so deeply in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Church of England five years after writing The Waste Land - a path that his friend and fellow poet W. H. Auden was to also follow some years later. Eliot went on to write many much loved plays, poems, and devotional literature, much of it shaped and informed by his conversion to Christ. For him the ancient story of the Christian faith provided the purpose giving story within which each and every individual story acquired meaning and purpose; whilst the ancient rites and practices of the Church represented, not a relic of the distant past to escape to, but an unchanging foretaste of the heavenly future in God’s presence that all of humanity was intended to experience - "on earth as in heaven."