Word: elegiac
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There is no oratory in December 7. Twenty-eight years ago last week, as World War I began, Sir Edward Gray, tall, elegant, elegiac, looked out on a darkening London on the darkest day of his life and murmured the phrases that will live longer than his works. "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Like a thin spire of a phrase left standing from another epoch, the words ominously summed up the mood of the pre-War world...
...description is accurate, dramatic, elegiac. Europe's breakdown "cannot be explained in terms of any single revolutionary formula." A series of sinister political geniuses, he believes, had something to do with it. "Lenin was its herald and pioneer. Hitler has made a great contribution. Mussolini and Stalin have played important roles. . . . But the revolt is not the handiwork of any single man or group of men. . . . Over this tremendous collapse . . . broods a strong element of fatalistic inevitability...
...wakening was Decision's first effort to revive western culture. Its first issue was ghostly and nostalgic, largely composed of sad reminiscences, tortured verse, confused self-questionings. Its most substantial pieces were a disillusioned essay by Aldous Huxley, condemning modern Europe's faith in facts, and an elegiac article on French civilization by Janet Planner...