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Introduction

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20th-Century Poetry

Part of the book series: Great Writers Student Library

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Abstract

“On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf observed in a famous phrase, “human nature changed.” E. M. Forster, writing immediately after the Great War, offered a more conventional assessment, remarking that “the world broke up” in 1914. Forster’s is the interpretation which has stayed with us, calling up those long sunny afternoons of Georgian tranquillity, plunged into sudden darkness by the eruption of continental war. It is a satisfying and a convenient myth, but it will not hold up to scrutiny, as George Dangerfield showed many years ago in his authoritative work, The Strange Death of Liberal England.

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© 1983 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Smith, S. (1983). Introduction. In: 20th-Century Poetry. Great Writers Student Library. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17056-2_1

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