T.S. Eliot - Contexts

poem and theme

The Hollow men

1925 - halfway through modernist decade

emptiness of modern existence without God to give meaning

Men are physically spiritually dead

post-wasteland - and post-menty b at bank

The Journey of the Magi

Portrait Of A Lady

Adeleine Moffat had a salon where she would invite young undergrad to talk about intellectual things.

Dramatic monologue, Robert Browning

The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot signed his name T. Stearns Eliot

Allusion to Divine comedy in epigraph - elitist not mass culture he wasn’t all that with the ladies

Preludes

grew up in St. Louis - 1920 was the first time in American history that more people lived in the city than the countryside

mass culture