The Hollow Men (1925) is a poem by T. S. Eliot. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognized to be concerned most with post-World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles, the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, and, as some critics argue, Eliot's own failed marriage.The poem is divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines of which the last four are probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.Some critics read the poem as told from three perspectives, each representing a phase of the passing of a soul into one of death's kingdoms (death's dream kingdom, death's twilight kingdom, and death's other kingdom). Eliot describes how we, the living, will be seen by Those who have crossed/ With direct eyes [...] not as lost/Violent souls, but only/As the hollow men/The stuffed men. The image of eyes figures prominently in the poem, notably in one of Eliot's most famous lines Eyes I dare not meet in dreams.