Part 1 of Essay
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) began his spiritual enquiry as a young man. At university he studied comparative religions and the medieval mystics. His thinking was greatly influenced by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the poet Ezra Pound. Eliot’s experimentation with forms of poetry were a kind of literary journey ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... even earlier work, The Waste Land (1922), Eliot concluded that ‘some forms of illness are extremely favourable to religious illumination’. I have not had personal experience of this but I am aware that serious illness and death can often make people focus sharply on the meaning of life. This could be said of the circumstances surrounding the writing of The Hollow Men, even if the ‘illumination’ simply highlighted a very dark time in Eliot’s life. The overriding image of humankind as ‘hollow men’ is powerful and ....