In 1927, at 38 years of age, the expatriated American poet T.S. Eliot was baptised and confirmed in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. The celebrated author of The Waste Land (1922) – that literary paragon of abject nihilism – had pivoted away from the liberal, philosophical underpinnings of his upbringing and education, the urbane prejudices of his peers, and the near-blasphemous despondency of his marriage, to become a man of faith.

Eliot’s change of heart and mind did not happen overnight, nor without warning. Published 100 years ago, his 1925 poem The Hollow Men provides something of a bridge between the wastelands of 1922 and the spiritual rebirth of 1927.

Alternating between the choral “we” and the more personal “I”, The Hollow Men is by turns outward-facing and inward-facing. It is diagnostic and symptomatic, accusatory and culpable, communal and personal. It is a poem about that which ails society at large, and about that which gnaws at the soul of the poet.

The Hollow Men both precipitated and explains Eliot’s rather unfashionable turn toward religion in a climate of vehement intellectualism. It is a shift that anybody interested in, say, the rise of religious nationalism or the backlash against elitism in the current moment might just find noteworthy.

The Hollow Men begins with a pair of epigraphs. The first is taken from Joseph Conrad’s slender novel, Heart of Darkness: “Mistah Kurtz – he dead.” The second makes reference to Guy Fawkes.

The figures of Kurtz and Fawkes – as well as Shakespeare’s Brutus, from whose mouth the phrase “hollow men” is directly taken – are keys to understanding many of the impulses and themes driving not only the poem but the mindset that shaped it. Eliot was in a very dark place when he wrote The Hollow Men – in his own words, “the blackest moment in my life”. Think of Kurtz up the Congo River, Fawkes stocking the parliamentary cellars with gunpowder, Brutus mulling over his decision to partake in the assassination of Julius Caesar.

The source of his despair was the spiritual paralysis and cultural decay that he had come to associate, through personal experience, with the the intellectualism of the modern era.

Eliot studied at Harvard and Oxford, completing his dissertation on the idealist philosophy of F.H. Bradley in 1916. But he was never awarded his doctorate from Harvard because he did not show up to defend it.

The simple explanation for this was that he was not in North America to do so; he was living in Europe by this stage. Given the direction he was heading, however, a different explanation might well be put forward: Eliot had lost the strength of his earlier convictions and was in no mood to put on a show of defending what he would ultimately come to view as indefensible. In a letter to his mother from 1929, he wrote:

I am sure that I should have made a very poor professor of Philosophy, because, after my first enthusiasm, I found modern philosophy to be nothing more than a logomachy [an argument about words], believed in by its professors, chiefly because they had to make their living out of it.

At a recent event hosted by the conservative think tank, American Compass, the organisation’s founder Oren Cass introduced Vice President J.D. Vance with the following comments:

I am thrilled to have this opportunity to talk with you and so grateful that the work you’re doing and, in a sense, so in awe of it........

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