What is the relationship between Heart of Darkness (T.S. Eliot) and The Hollow Men (Joseph Conrad)?

Question

T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men, unusually, opens with a quote from a Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: > Mistah Kurtz— he dead. In most printings of the poem that I've seen, this single quote is given an *entire page* which is otherwise blank. If that was the author's intention, this surely underlines the significance of the link between the two to the poet. At a high level, there's a clear thematic relationship between the two: both are about the fundamental barbarity of man. However it seems likely there is a deeper relationship between the two, both in terms of close reading and in terms of how the one inspired the other. Can anyone elucidate on why the poet chose to open with this quote, whether there are deeper links here, and what they might be?

Answer 1

In The Heart of Darkness, as Marlow witnesses a dying Kurtz, he calls the man in his deathbed a "hollow sham" caught between love and hatred of his own worst tendencies. The character of Kurtz, right until his death, represents the violence and greed of the human soul left unchecked. In The Hollow Men, Elliot posits that these figures, the "violent souls" will be remembered as no more than hollow men. The last words that Kurtz utters, "the horror, the horror," put into words the barbarism, emptiness, and savagery of man's greed. The Hollow Men can be be viewed, then, as an expansion of this realization. The hollow men, like Kurtz, seem to be at a point of transition, such as the one between life and death. They both seek and fear the "eyes" that would judge or redeem them. They acknowledge their hollowness, their sightlessness, yet cling to it desperately. In Kurtz's own dying moments, he too is caught between a "a diabolic love" and an "unearthly hate" of his own dark nature. The Hollow Men, taking inspiration from this very conflict, makes the allusion to Kurtz's death as a musing on the nature of depraved men.