^{Note 1 in page 426} E.g., Ferner Nuhn in The Wind Blew From The East (New York, 1942), p. 237, says that the church, symbolized in the words “multifoliate rose” as a mystical body, “is not life, but death—the hope only of empty men, as we learn in ‘The Hollow Men’. ”

^{Note 2 in page 426} Typical of earlier critical viewpoints toward The Hollow Men are G. Wilson Knight's assertion that it is the last poem of Eliot's “death valley” (The Christian Renaissance, Toron to, 1933, p. 372), and Morton D. Zabel's description of the work as “a flagging and dispirited declamation, devoid of organic fusion” (Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, xxxii, Sept. 1930, 337). More recently, such critics as F. P. Wilson and D. E. S. Maxwell, having found evidence of hope in the poem, have pointed out that it shows “slight signs of faith” and “that a way to salvation has been perceived.” Still, Wilson assumes that the poet is bitter at men, including himself, who admit that “Thine is the kingdom,” but continue to protest that “life is very long” (Six Essays on the Development of T. S. Eliot, London, 1948, p. 33); and Maxwell asserts that while the affirmation has been made, “it seems that the burden of gaining entrance into the kingdom will prove too much” (The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, London, 19S2, p. 141). Likewise, Grover Smith, Jr., finds in The Hollow Men belief that a way to salvation exists, but he does not find that the way has been taken (G. 5. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Shidy in Sources and Meaning, Chicago, 1956, pp. 99-110).

^{Note 3 in page 426} The Complete Works of St. John of the Cross, trans, and ed. E. Allison Peers (London, 1934-35), I, 21. All quotations are taken from this edition, referred to hereafter simply as Works.

^{Note 4 in page 427} “Notes on Ash Wednesday,” Southern Rev., iv (1939), 745-770. It is no less likely that Eliot was familiar with the works of St. John of the Cross when he wrote The Hollow Men than when he made extensive use of them in Ash Wednesday. Though quotations in this article are taken for the sake of convenience from the 1934-35 edition by Allison Peers, it is obvious that Eliot could not have used this edition when composing either poem. Whether or not Eliot was familiar with the original texts, English translations of Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul were available for some time before the publication of The Hollow Men in 1925. Furthermore, translations of both works had recently been reissued in London by T. Baker, the former in 1922, the latter in 1924. The appearance of these two books was quite likely to have attracted the attention of Eliot during the time when he was publishing fragment by fragment the poem that came in its final form to be The Hollow Men. Although Eliot did not specifically discuss any work of St. John of the Cross until 1934 {Criterion, xin, 709-710), he did refer to him in “Lancelot Andrewes,” TLS, xxv (23 Sept. 1926), 621: “The English Church has no literary monument equal to that of Dante, no intellectual monument equal to that of St. Thomas, no devotional monument equal to that of St. John of the Cross, no building so beautiful as the Cathedral of Modena or the basilica of St. Zeno in Verona.” This statement was made over a year after the publication of The Hollow Men, but it does suggest some familiarity with the writings in question.

^{Note 5 in page 427} The passage in Burnt Norton beginning “Here is a place of disaffection” is directly indebted to St. John of the Cross and at the same time more closely resembles The Hollow Men than does any part of The Waste Land or any other verse written by Eliot. “Nor darkness to purify the soul” recalls the words of the Spanish mystic, but more striking are the echoes of Eliot's own earlier poem. “In a dim light: neither daylight Nor darkness” compares with the twilight atmosphere of The Hollow Men. The contrast in Burnt Norton of “slow rotation suggesting permanence” with “Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind” does call to mind the similar contrast of the circling motion in Sec. ? of The Hollow Men with “Behaving as the wind behaves” in Sec. ii. Again, “Tumid apathy” seems to look back to “tumid river.” Most important of all, “Filled with fancies and empty of meaning … Neither plenitude nor vacancy” suggests the “stuffed men … Headpiece filled with straw,” who may be made hopeful only by becoming “empty” just as in Burnt Norton the soul may be purified only by “Emptying the sensual with deprivation.” It must be granted that Eliot's known practice is to borrow from earlier poems and to set old images or lines to new purposes as his own thought changes and develops. Therefore, what the words and images mean in Burnt Norton may not be precisely the same as in The Hollow Men. The parallels cited here, nevertheless, are too specific to be ignored; they suggest strongly that The Hollow Men is a long step toward the Four Quartets rather than a very short step out of The Waste Land.

^{Note 6 in page 428} “The Poetry of T. S. Eliot,” Living Age, cccxxix (1926), 114.

^{Note 7 in page 428} Unger supposes that the Speaker in Ash Wednesday does not hope to turn again because “To turn would be to depart from the state of purgation and humility and enter the state of existence of the hollow men who ‘go round the prickly pear’ ” (“Notes on Ash Wednesday,” pp. 748-749). George Williamson says that the passage “mocks the hope of empty [i.e., hollow] men. In desire they ‘circumambulate’ the pear, but are frustrated by the prickles” {A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis, New York, 1953, p. 159).

^{Note 8 in page 428} It is noteworthy that in this passage motion is used in the same sense as is the word movement in the conclusion to Burnt Norton:

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being. Here again, though Eliot perhaps developed greater understanding of the concepts over a long period of time, is a parallel which suggests that The Hollow Men represents a further stage in the poet's spiritual development than has commonly been thought.

^{Note 9 in page 429} St. John of the Cross, Works, I, 466. ¹⁰ The epigraphs to the poem express a limited admiration for, though not approval of, Kurtz of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Guy Fawkes. These “lost/Violent souls” at least had made a moral choice, whereas the hollow men have avoided any sort of decision, or movement of the will. In the first section the speakers resemble very much the “Trimmers” outside Dante's Inferno, who appear also as “Shape without form, shade without color,” and are practically impossible to recognize as human:

Questi non hanno speranza di morte,

? la lor cieca vita è tanto bassa

Che 'nvidiosi son d'ogni altra sorte.

Fama di loro il mondo esser non lassa, Misericordia e giustizia li sdegna. Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa (iii.46-51).

^{Note 11 in page 430} With the exception of two changes, the scheme is Max-well's (p. 140; see n. 2 above). Maxwell does not include the appearance of Sec. i in Commerce, and he assumes incorrectly that the first poem in Chapbook is Sec. ii of The Hollow Men.

^{Note 12 in page 431} This passage also is illuminated by a statement in Dark Night of the Soul: “God makes it to die to all that is not naturally God, so that once it [the soul] is stripped and denuded of its former skin, He may begin to clothe it anew” (Works, I, 445).

^{Note 13 in page 431} Rejection of this passage may have been the result of Eliot's conceiving the “eyes” as a direct symbol of divine reality, after St. John of the Cross. The specific reference to Beatrice would then have become superfluous, since it is too personalized in Dantean terms to express the concept and the emotion desired in The Hollow Men. The discarding of the lines beginning “Eyes that last I saw in tears,” which “hold us in derision” (the eyes of Beatrice) would seem to bear this out (see Purgatorio xxx, xxxi).