Influence in Culture
The Hollow Men has had a profound effect on the Anglo-American cultural lexicon and – by a relatively recent extension – world culture since it was published in 1925. References range from film (Apocalypse Now, Waking Life) to video games (Fable II, the Halo series, and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty), to Japanese literature (the novels of Haruki Murakami), to American television shows (30 Rock, Frasier, The Big Bang Theory, Northern Exposure, Dexter, Mad Men, The X-Files, and Dollhouse ). Stephen King used a stanza to begin his novel, The Stand. The Acacia Strain also used a variation of a quote from the poem in their song "Nightman." The poem is the source of the title for Nevil Shute's On the Beach. The Anime Highschool Of The Dead uses the last two lines of the poem to end the first season's last episode. In addition, books such us "Road to Woodbury" and "Warm Bodies" make use of the famous quote.
The poem's referential variety moves some questions concerning its significance outside the traditional domain of literary criticism – where Harold Bloom, for one, often half-laments Eliot's influence – and into the much broader category of cultural studies. Here, its history has itself become a subject for study in the work of many critics and artists, including, for instance, film essayist Chris Marker.
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Famous quotes containing the words influence in, influence and/or culture:
“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world ... and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)