“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

These words ended ‘The Hollow Men’ by T. S. Eliot a century ago in 1925. A century before that, 1825, George IV was king and the Victorian period hadn’t even started. And Byron died a year before in 1824. A lot changes in a hundred years, especially in literature, but it seems that Eliot hasn’t quite changed for us in the way poets from previous generations have. His work certainly doesn’t feel as far from us as Victorian poets like Tennyson or Browning – even though both were still alive when Eliot was born in 1888. They are roughly as far from Eliot as Seamus Heaney might be to someone under twenty now. It seems hard to get your head around, but the fact is that modernist poetry feels modern, still!

“‘The Hollow Men’ ends a period,” writes Eliot in a letter to Marianne Moore in 1934. He moves sharply away from his earlier style and towards what would become Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets, neither of which clings onto the earlier Eliot. His earliest drama, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), seems to turn his writing away from what can only politely be called the depravity of his work pre 1925. Even in his own life there is some change as Eliot leaves Lloyd’s bank to work with Geoffrey Faber in publishing. It seems then, that we are at the centenary of a turning point in Eliot’s writing and life; the end of young poet Thomas Stearns and the beginning of T.S. Eliot.

“It seems hard to get your head around, but the fact is that modernist poetry feels modern, still!”

Being a century away from the pivotal career point of one of the most influential modern poets to his ‘later’ work seems extreme. The Waste Land is further from us now than Tennyson’s In Memoriam was for Eliot when he wrote Four Quartets. It seems that modernist poetry, and modernism as a whole, has rather firmly planted its claws into our cultural imagination as what ‘modern-ish’ poetry is. Eliot’s first editions in the Hayward bequest in King’s are now delicate – his work more like an artefact in its physicality, yet one could be forgiven for feeling a slight resistance to this fact. Eliot seems so integral to a modern poetic canon that it’s hard to let go. But what else can we say about this centenary other than that the poem is old? To say Eliot was a visionary or something of a mystic with prophetic, timeless poetry seems misguided. To say he has simply remained relevant is stating the obvious, so then what?

Partly Eliot’s style seems not to age, but moreover Eliot makes a distinct effort, it seems, to maintain poetic remove. He is distinctly peculiar in that the vast biographical scholarship on his life contributes impressively little to interpreting his work. Indeed, the work seems distinct, impressively un-caught up with its time and author whilst inescapably entwined in it. ‘The Hollow Men’ provides a good case for this. Eliot felt peculiar about his lack of involvement in WW1, not serving in the military; the war was more of an inconvenience than a mortal threat in his years as a schoolteacher and reviewer.

“The poem isn’t an elegy but a taxidermy”

Yet, all the same his poem has some involvement in the post-war imagination in recalling men who return and are forgotten. This isn’t to equate Eliot with his contemporary war poets like Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, not least because thinking of these figures writing at the same time has an odd taste. Sassoon and Owen feel so stuck in GCSE education on war poetry that they are firmly situated in it against Eliot who seems somewhat timeless in comparison. This isn’t to use ‘timeless’ as meaning classic so much as it is to genuinely note its lack of concern with temporality as a chorus of hollow men speak. Eliot doesn’t care to connect these men to any point; the point is that they are unconnected. The poem isn’t an elegy but a taxidermy. It is immersed in its own distinct present tense in such a way that it resists being read historically or prophetically. Either reading seems dreary when the text begs to be read alone.

So, what is there to conclude on this great figure of twentieth-century poetry at the centenary of a turning point in his life? Firstly, we might note that his presence has exuded into our modern imagination remarkably well; he doesn’t feel so dated quite yet. Secondly there seems to be no real case for reading the work as something transhistorical: it is poetic. When Eliot says this is how the world ends, we believe him not simply because of our own world, but because Eliot doesn’t say it, rather his poem does. There is nothing at stake in what his poem’s speakers say, they are unlistened to, so a reader is able to take from it what they will, without invalidating its authority. Lastly, perhaps Eliot should begin to age as we take up new material in our imagination. Indeed, it may already be happening as The Waste Land fades back to literary history; his poems call out from their place in history rather like Eliot’s “hollow men”. The poem celebrates its own centenary.