Week Three - T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men"

In the film Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando stirringly reads a section of Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men." The video above is the poem read by Brando in its entirety. The filmmakers did an excellent job of incorporating this poem, because there are many parallels between it and this film. Apocalypse Now explores a theme that Eliot frequented in his poetry: how war, among other aspects of modern society, has deteriorated the human mind and condition.

Like "The Hollow Men," the film also references Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. In fact, Brando's character is even named "Kurtz." While inner darkness and evil could be as much to blame as the debilitating modern culture, an interesting question emerges: Is there such a thing as insanity in a world that has already gone insane?

Week Two - Owen and Sassoon

My favorite poems from this week were Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" and Siegfried Sassoon's "Repression of War Experience."

Sassoon's line, "It's bad to think of war, / When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you," is especially powerful, and it made me want to explore some of his "inspirations."

Soldiers blinded from tear gas.

Vickers machine gun crew with gas masks.

This image, taken after the Battle of Passchendaele in Belgium, reminded me also of last week's poem that was partially a response to World War I: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. It's no wonder that this war produced such a negative response afterwords. The pictures are so depressingly haunting - I can't imagine what it would have been like to actually experience. These war poets are essential parts and compressors of this history.