/lit/ - Literature

>>20729834
Yeah I was amazed when I found it was written in 1913, because it fits absolutely perfectly the mood of just 5 or 6 years later, when the troops were returning from the war. They had set off eager and enthusiastic and they returned absolutely broken. I made this meme of it several years ago because it seemed to fit so well.

I wonder if he was somehow anticipating events, as great artists can sometimes do? (You see this with Blake, for example.) Or if he was actually writing about some earlier conflict he had read about? Is there a famous account in classical literature of men returning from a war, battered and disillusioned?

>>19802250
"The Return" is osensibly about the decline of the Greek Gods, but I think it conveys perfectly the feeling of soldiers returning home broken and disillusioned (a sort of Born of the Fourth of July vibe).

I assumed at first that he wrote it in the 1920s, as a result of the First World War, but it was actually published in 1913.

But great artists often show a weird ability to foreshadow things. In the wider sense it's about a civilization losing confidence and direction, and that would certainly have been palpable in 1913. Spengler published The Decline Of The West in 1918, after all, and that must have taken him many years to write.

>>19011132