A century ago, T.S. Eliot put this Lenten faith into poetry. Raised in a Unitarian home and educated at elite institutions where liberalism was fashionable, he nevertheless felt a gnawing hunger deep in his soul. After WWI, his modernist poetry used an experimental style to capture his disenchantment with the modern world. The Waste Land, the long poem which made Eliot into a literary celebrity in 1922, is nothing less than a cry of despair over the ruins of European civilization left in the wake of WWI.
In the following years, Eliot came to understand that the crisis of modernity he sought to articulate was not only cultural and civilizational, but also deeply spiritual. In 1925 – exactly one hundred years ago – he published a poem titled “The Hollow Men” expressing this dimension of the all-encompassing crisis. Although not yet a believer when it was written, “The Hollow Men” reveals the deep longings of Eliot and his generation that only Christianity could satisfy.
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