TS Eliot's attitude toward death in the Hollow men “Hollow Men” is one of the masterpieces of the famous 20th century philosopher poet T.S. Eliot. Eliot wrote this poem in 1925 (though it was published in parts, part 1, part 2, parts 3&4, and then the whole poem was published together with the added ending). The poem's motif is death's kingdom or death's dream kingdom or death's twilight kingdom. In the poem 'Hollow Men', Eliot presents the state and feelings of death of the 'hollow men' which he supposes as leading meaningless and empty lives, similar to life of stuffed creatures, having no purpose for existence, no hope for better, almost a disregard for everything that has existed or will exist. With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom (1st stanza) symbolizes hollow men's feeling at the moment they think about death. Eliot's poetry has a pattern of recurrent archetypal images and has an interconnection and a definite pattern of evolution (American Traditional Literature p 115). They start from a negative attitude towards life which changes gradually into a positive one.

In the first two stanzas Eliot describes the perspectives of the hollow men, or the those who had a vague perspective of God, death and afterlife. In their false belief, they glimpse a blurred destination after their death - that is anything except heaven, might be purgatory or even hell. Even if these hollow men consider their final place as heaven, they would still be in a state of guilt, and probably find it difficult to face God. The use of words like dead land, cactus land and stone images probably indicates the torment of the painful state of either what the hollow man feels at death, or what he feels due to his failure to accomplish what he could otherwise ...