Hollow Men Journal

Why do you think T.S. Eliot used the line from Heart of Darkness ("Mistah Kurtz - he dead.") to introduce this poem? How is this poem and Heart of Darkness in conversation with each other (how do they relate to one another?)?

Heart of Darkness relates to the Hollow Men poem because of its characters and what happens to them. Two of the people who could be used as examples are Kurtz and the manager. The manager is incredibly bland, and Marlow sees this in him through the emptiness of his smile. He had been almost completely drained of emotion because he had worked for the company for so long,  giving him a sort of hollow quality.

The poem also relates to Kurtz.  At the end of the fifth and final part of the poem, it says:

"This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper."

I think this relates to Kurtz' death, which came somewhat abruptly and without a lot of direct dramatic buildup. It is even more fitting to Kurtz' death that this line is at the end of the poem, and one of Marlow's main objectives was to find Kurtz. Once he died, a significant part of the story died with him, and to me (in some ways) the book ended there.