War & Peace Quote by Frank Scott

There is a quiet brag tucked inside this line, but it’s the kind a poet can get away with: not “I changed Europe,” just “I was brought in touch.” The passive construction matters. Scott isn’t claiming authorship of the era’s new thinking so much as positioning himself as a conduit, someone whose authority comes from proximity to the source. In a cultural moment when Canada’s intellectual class often measured itself against Europe’s “real” modernity, that phrasing is a passport stamp.

“Developing post World War I ideas” is deliberately elastic. It can mean political ferment (social democracy, anti-fascism, new constitutional thinking), aesthetic revolution (modernism’s break with Victorian ornament), or the broader mood: disillusionment with old empires, distrust of inherited certainty, a craving for systems that might prevent another slaughter. Scott compresses all that into a clean, respectable phrase, as if naming the turbulence too directly would sound partisan. The vagueness is strategic: it signals sophistication without forcing a single allegiance.

Context does a lot of the work. For someone born in 1899, the war isn’t abstract history; it’s the organizing trauma of early adulthood. To be “brought in touch” after it is to step into a Europe rebuilding its mind as much as its cities. The sentence reads like an origin story for a writer-intellectual: the self formed not only by books but by contact, atmosphere, argument. It’s also a subtle claim of modernity: I was there when the new century’s nervous system was being wired.