The beginning of the twenty-first century turns the twentieth century into the past,

just as the nineteenth century has recently become the past of the twentieth century.
The change of centuries is accompanied by summing up results and predictive
reflections. The assumption about the unusual of the twentieth century arose before ist
beginning. The crisis of civilization foreseen by the romantics was fully realized through
the Boer War, two world wars, the threat of atomic entropy and local military conflicts.
The belief in the progress of the natural sciences and their beneficial impact on people’s
lives is undermined by historical reality. The 20th century showed that in the process of
technological development the humanistic dimension of life is lost. This thought became
tautology at the end of the century. A premonition of the wrong way arose among philosophers
and artists in the transition from XIX to XX century. Nietzsche described civilization as a thin
layer of gilding on the animal nature of man, and Spengler predicted the fatal collapse of
European culture.
The First World War destroyed the stable social and state relations of the 19th century,
forcing man to rethink values, find his place in a changed reality, and realize the hostility of the
outside world. Many European writers, especially the younger generation after the war, were
skeptical of the prevalence of social practice over the spiritual nature of man.
Having lost the illusion in estimating the world that had produced them and having woken
up from the saturated petty bourgeois, the intelligentsia perceived the crisis of society as a failure
of European civilization in general. This led to pessimism and distrust among young authors
(O.Huxley, D.Lawrence, A.Barbus, E.Hemingway). The same loss of steady landmarks shattered
the optimistic perception of older writers (G.Wells, D.Golsworthy, A.France).
The First World War was a hard test for the younger generation of writers, revealing the
falseness of patriotic slogans. This has reinforced the need to find new authorities and values,
leading many writers to retreat into the world of intimate experiences as a way of hiding from
external realities. The experience of fear and pain, as well as the horror of violent death, changed
the aesthetics of writers, forcing them to reconsider their attitude to the repulsive aspects of life.
The deceased and returned authors, such as R. Aldington, A. Barbus, E. Hemingway, Z.
Sassoon and F. S. Fitzgerald, were assigned to the „lost generation“. Although the term does not
fully cover their influence on literature, literary scholars continue to highlight their deep
understanding of man during and after the war. Writers of this generation were the first to draw
readers‘ attention to a phenomenon later called the „war syndrome“ in the second half of the
twentieth century.
In the poetry of the first half of the 20th century, similar processes, as in prose, were
accompanied by criticism of technogenic civilization. The work of T. Tsar, A. Breton, G. Lorca,
P. Eluard, T. S. Eliot led to the evolution of the poetic language. The artistic form became more
sophisticated, integrating different art forms, and deepened in essence with the aspiration to
understand the subconscious. Poetry has become more subjective, symbolic, coded, actively
using the free form of the verse (verlibre).