"The Hollow Men" (1925) is a poem by the modernist writer T. S. Eliot. Like much of his work, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary, concerned with post–World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised: compare "Gerontion"), hopelessness, religious conversion, redemption and, some critics argue, his failing marriage with Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot. It was published two years before Eliot converted to Anglicanism. Divided into five parts, the poem is 98 lines long. Eliot's New York Times obituary in 1965 identified the final four as "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English". Theme and context Eliot wrote that he produced the title "The Hollow Men" by combining the titles of the romance The Hollow Land by William Morris with the poem "The Broken Men" by Rudyard Kipling; but it is possible that this is one of Eliot's many constructed allusions. The title could also be theorized to originate more transparently from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or from the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who is referred to as a "hollow sham" and "hollow at the core". The latter is more likely since Kurtz is mentioned specifically in one of the two epigraphs. The two epigraphs to the poem, "Mistah Kurtz – he dead" and "A penny for the Old Guy", are allusions to Conrad's character and to Guy Fawkes. Fawkes attempted arson of the English Houses of Parliament in 1605 and his straw-man effigy is burned each year in the United Kingdom on Guy Fawkes Night, the 5th of November. Certain quotes from the poem such as "[...] headpiece filled with straw [...]" and "[...] in our dry cellar [...]" seem to be direct references to the Gun Powder Plot. The Hollow Men follows the otherworldly journey of the spiritually dead. These "hollow men" have the realization, humility, and acknowledgement of their guilt and their status as broken, lost souls. Their shame is seen in lines like "[...] eyes I dare not meet in dreams [...]" calling themselves "[...] sightless [...]" and that that "[...] [death is] the only hope of empty men [...]". The "hollow men" fail to transform their motions into actions, conception to creation, desire to fulfillment. This awareness of the split between thought and action coupled with their awareness of "death's various kingdoms" and acute diagnosis of their hollowness, makes it hard for them to go