Literary Allusions in Eliot's The Hollow Men Scholars have long sought to identify the sources of various images in TS Eliot's work, so densely layered with literary allusions. As Eliot himself noted in his essay "Philip Massinger" (1920),One of the surest tests is how a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets transform it into something better, or at least something different. In Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men", several sources have been suggested for the "hollow men... the embalmed men / leaning together". filled with straw" (lines 1-2). BC Southam notes three: that the "hollow... stuffed men" are reminiscent of the effigies burned to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day; that "according to Valerie Eliot, the poet had in mind the puppet of Stravinsky's Petrouchka"; and finally, that "straw-stuffed effigies are associated with harvest rituals celebrating the death of the fertility god or Fisher King." (n1) In 1963, a few years before Southam's summary, John Vickery had offered a similar interpretation to the third point mentioned that "the first lines of 'The Hollow Men' with their image of straw-filled creatures, are reminiscent of The Golden Bough's tale of the straw man it represents. the dead spirit of fertility that is reborn in spring when the apple trees begin to blossom."(n2) While Eliot may have had some or all of these ideas in mind, I suggest that there is yet another connection to be made, namely between Eliot's "empty men" and the Roman ritual of Argei. In 1922, a few years before Eliot wrote "The Hollow Men", W. Warde Fowler described the details of this ritual, which was for him a "fascinating enigma" and "the first curiosity which led him" to the study of Roman religion". , in his book Roman Religious Experience. (n3) The rite according to Fowler occurs every year on the ides of May, which in my opinion is rather magical than religious, although the ancients themselves looked upon it as a kind of purification, [i.e.] the throwing of twenty-four or twenty-seven straw puppets into the Tiber by the Vestals in the presence of magistrates and popes. Recently Wissowa has attempted to demonstrate that this strange ceremony was not primitive, but simply a case of replacing puppets with real ones. human victims dating back to the time of the Punic Wars..