The Hollow MenThomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of New England descent, on September 26, 1888. He entered Harvard University in 1906, completing his coursework in three years and earned a master's degree the following year. After a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, he returned to Harvard. Further studies took him to Merton College, Oxford, and he decided to remain in England. He worked first as a teacher and then at Lloyd's Bank until 1925. He subsequently joined the London publishing house Faber and Gwyer, becoming director when the publishing house became Faber and Faber in 1929. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 and other important recognitions. literary prizes. Eliot saw an exhausted poetic style employed, containing no verbal excitement or original craftsmanship, by the Georgian poets who were active when he settled in London. He tried to make the poem subtler, more suggestive and at the same time more precise. He learned the need for clear and precise imagery, and he also learned to fear romantic softness and to regard the poetic medium rather than the personality of the poet as the important factor. Eliot saw in the French Symbolists how the image could be both absolutely precise in what it physically referred to and yet infinitely suggestive in the meanings it created because of its relationship to other images. Eliot's real novelty was his deliberate elimination of all merely connective and transitory passages, his construction of the total scheme of meaning through the immediate comparison of images without explicit explanation of what they are doing, together with the use of indirect references to other works of literature (some sometimes quite obscure). Eliot begins his poem "The Hollow Men" with a quote from Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. The phrase "Mistah Kurtz-he dead" refers to a Mr. Kurtz who was a European trader who had gone to the "heart of darkness" traveling into the jungles of Central Africa, with European standards of living and conduct. Since he had no moral or spiritual strength to sustain him, he was soon transformed into a barbarian. He differs, however, from Eliot's "hollow men" in that he is not paralyzed like them, but upon his death glimpses the nature of his actions when he states "The horror! The horror!" Kurtz is therefore one of the "lost/violent souls" mentioned in the verses 15-16.