The Hollow Men

"The Hollow Men" is a 1925 poem by T.S.

Eliot depicting spiritual emptiness and moral paralysis in the modern world.

Its closing lines—This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper—have become widely quoted shorthand for anticlimactic collapse or failure.

The phrase "hollow men" describes people who lack conviction or substance: The committee was staffed by hollow men who never challenged anything.