Although born on the US, Eliot was living in Britain by 1925, and ‘The Hollow Men’, on one level, describes a people in stasis and limbo, men (and it is specifically men) who have lost their way. Published in 1925, ‘The Hollow Men’ captures a different mid-1920s mood from the one we get from The Great Gatsby and other works written across the Atlantic, during the ‘Jazz Age’. ‘If’ you do so – then, Kipling says addressing his implied male reader, ‘you’ll be a man, my son!’ (Or, as Alan Partridge paraphrased it, ‘If you do X, Y, and Z – Bob’s your uncle’.) A certain masculine stoicism looms large in Kipling’s poem – that is, the acknowledgement that, whilst you cannot always prevent bad things from happening to you, you can deal with them in a good way. So concludes this poem, which was first published in Kipling’s volume of short stories and poems, Rewards and Fairies, in 1910, it has become one of Kipling’s best-known poems, and was even voted the UK’s favourite poem of all time in a poll of 1995. Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,Īnd-which is more-you’ll be a Man, my son! With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
If all men count with you, but none too much If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, Or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch,
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
