At the time he published “Journey of the Magi,” Eliot was known primarily for his exploration in poetry of the decay of Western culture. He was most famous for “The Waste Land,” a poem in which people live their everyday lives without purpose or belief. Society is fragmented and sterile, without any underlying common values to support it. “The Hollow Men” (1925), as its title suggests, expresses a similar point of view. The hollow men are the spiritually dead, living ghostly, ineffective lives:

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar (T. S. Eliot. “The Hollow Men.” All Poetry. 1925. Lines 5-10).

The next poem that Eliot wrote was “Journey of the Magi,” in which the Magi, whatever else they may be, are certainly not “hollow men”; they are men of purpose, determined, resolute, doubts notwithstanding. They have a role to play in the emergence of the new dispensation, the Christian era. This might seem like a sharp break with Eliot’s previous themes, and indeed that is so. However, as his biographer Peter Ackroyd points out, Eliot’s religious sensibilities had begun to develop some years earlier, in 1923, when he met William Force Stead, an American poet who was living in England and had been ordained in the Church of England.