The Great War in Europe devastated towns and villages, obliterated irreplaceable architecture, and destroyed an entire generation of young men. The survivors were conscious of living in a shattered civilization, and felt a collective lack of confidence and direction. In “Signs of the Times,” written in the late 1920s, D. H. Lawrence described how young men under thirty, sick of war and materialism, have

a certain instinctive contempt
for old values and old people:
a certain warlessness even moneylessness,
a waiting for the proper touch, not for

any word or deed.

The aged Thomas Hardy had “the proper touch.” His bleak but unflinchingly realistic vision profoundly appealed to traumatized war poets. Prominent survivors~dashincluding Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and T. E. Lawrence—made pilgrimages to the author at his home, Max Gate, near Dorchester. Drawn to him for personal and poetic reasons, they hero-worshipped the Old Master. He responded by encouraging them, praising their work, and accepting them, at the beginning of their careers, as colleagues. Hardy’s complex and often moving relations with these writers reveal his great reputation and influence between the wars.[1] He helped them repair their ruined lives, gave them a living link to the tradition of English poetry, and restored their faith in cultural continuity.

At the turn of the century Hardy, father-figure to the Georgians, was the most controversial poet in England, and his reputation has continued to rise throughout the modern age. Ford Madox Ford