Conrad’s niggers are, in their feeble and shadowy existential realities, alluded to in The Hollow Men. In a sense, black activities and intellectuals from the Harlem ghetto resemble them. They are human beings full of hunger, disease and fear which situate their condition not in ancient Africa or Europe but America as limbo itself. Having experienced acculturation or alienation, the black ex-slaves become neither African nor European in outlook. Their sad king or leader named Doris (“I” in this verse) is “Shape without form, shade without colour”. He lives in exile at a place of humiliation and self-indulgence. The slave singers are perhaps realistic to identify themselves with the ghosts of non-humans constituting a mystery and danger to normal
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Eliot said in 1923 that he would like to copy Aristophanes in such a poetic utterance as this "song" in which he could embody political, religious, and psychological dilemmas and struggles to achieve a perfect state of peace and harmony. The blacks had employed witticism and sloganising phraseology and dared to sing songs full of racism and social protest. They likewise danced in an attempt to forget or minimise their sorrows which America's harsh laws and surroundings chiefly brought to African slaves or their modern survivors. The mock songs of early Black Americans using an "un-Negro tongue" are well apprehended and mimicked by Eliot as a man of genius who leads the modernist writers including Ezra Pound and W. B. …show more content…
He calls them "empty men" struggling for instant change or modification in their economic, socio-cultural, and political status as underprivileged minority group of people in a foreign land. On the turbulent landscape of an American "waste land" that is not like London, Eliot cannot associate with the Blackman's image and presence. For it is only the Europeans who retain a high sense of culture available in form of an upper-middle-class cocktail party, sitting room conversation, and October evening visit to enjoy Chopin's music or see the movie and opera in well-furnished theatres. It is remarkable that Eliot's poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, Rhapsody on a Windy Night and Portrait of a Lady give us a recognisable locale of human beings at the crossroads of 20th-century industrialised society. However, this artistic pattern may not be linked to a "song" of segregated blacks with the appearance of wild-looking rats; they are rustics inhabiting a "dead land" as 9 the dark or shaded "valley" (or abyss) of physical weakness, mental depression, broken column and glass, famine and solitude. A Hollow Man is naturally resident far from the city centre where a lover named Prufrock has lately acquired prominence for his inertia. The
Eliot said in 1923 that he would like to copy Aristophanes in such a poetic utterance as this "song" in which he could embody political, religious, and psychological dilemmas and struggles to achieve a perfect state of peace and harmony. The blacks had employed witticism and sloganising phraseology and dared to sing songs full of racism and social protest. They likewise danced in an attempt to forget or minimise their sorrows which America's harsh laws and surroundings chiefly brought to African slaves or their modern survivors. The mock songs of early Black Americans using an "un-Negro tongue" are well apprehended and mimicked by Eliot as a man of genius who leads the modernist writers including Ezra Pound and W. B. …show more content…
He calls them "empty men" struggling for instant change or modification in their economic, socio-cultural, and political status as underprivileged minority group of people in a foreign land. On the turbulent landscape of an American "waste land" that is not like London, Eliot cannot associate with the Blackman's image and presence. For it is only the Europeans who retain a high sense of culture available in form of an upper-middle-class cocktail party, sitting room conversation, and October evening visit to enjoy Chopin's music or see the movie and opera in well-furnished theatres. It is remarkable that Eliot's poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, Rhapsody on a Windy Night and Portrait of a Lady give us a recognisable locale of human beings at the crossroads of 20th-century industrialised society. However, this artistic pattern may not be linked to a "song" of segregated blacks with the appearance of wild-looking rats; they are rustics inhabiting a "dead land" as 9 the dark or shaded "valley" (or abyss) of physical weakness, mental depression, broken column and glass, famine and solitude. A Hollow Man is naturally resident far from the city centre where a lover named Prufrock has lately acquired prominence for his inertia. The