S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," were both written before 1914 (though "Prufrock" was not published until the following year). The effects of the World War did increase a general sense of hopelessness that found expression in literature, but the trend had already existed before the war and its carnage.

One could say that there was a general feeling within the Western Zeitgeist by about the year 1910 that a cataclysm was due to occur soon. This is the metaphorical significance of the cholera epidemic in Death in Venice, which is described as having apocalyptic dimensions. Why, though, was there already an anticipation of disaster? What accounts for the feeling "in the air" at the time that Europe and the world as a whole were on the verge of a catastrophe?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that, although technological advances had in fact created a "better world" for much of humanity, they conversely created a sense of loss among many people, especially those in the arts. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers expressed a longing for the past, for a time before man had moved beyond the older belief systems and traditions that had given meaning to life. For many intellectuals, religion had lost its power. Life had become increasingly secular and therefore, to many, had become empty.

This accounts for the obsession with the distant past, with legend and myth, among people as different as, for instance, Tennyson and Wagner. In the Arthurian legends, Tennyson found a source of meaning lacking in the modern, mechanized world, as Wagner did in the Norse myths and the story of the Holy Grail. In addition, for the Victorians, there was a sense that the achievements of the past in literature—from Spenser and Shakespeare up through the Romantic poets—had been so great that they could never be equaled. Artists in the nineteenth century had thus begun to believe they were already living in a post-historical age.

All of this, in my view, is where the modernism of the following century is rooted. It's a given, of course, that the "present" is rooted in the "past," but often modernist literature and art in general are seen as a negation of the work of the previous century. In some ways this is true, but I tend to see modernism, perhaps paradoxically, as more of a continuation of the previous era—or an intensification of some aspects of it, at least. The nineteenth-century Zeitgeist obviously can't be reduced to a simplistic formula, but much of it was already dominated by a sense of pessimism and alienation. Europeans seemingly knew that their colonial empires, though still expanding at the turn of the century, were going to expire eventually and that their dominance of the rest of the world could only last so long. This is the meaning of both Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Kipling's (despite his racism and jingoism in other poems) "Recessional." All of these factors—the sense of loss, the abandonment of religious faith, the anticipation of the decline of the West, and then finally the scale of bloodshed in the Great War—contributed to the alienation and hopelessness seen in the modernist period.