a biographer of Emerson and Thoreau describes in his work on Thoreau, how he, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, et al, sought to live 'a heroic life in an unheroic time'. Hesse's biographical "Steppenwolf" sought to live a spiritual life in a world he found mundane and trivial -- seeking a life sub specie aeternitatis amidst one ordered sub specie mundi.
Hesse, who wrote of being awakened by WWI, came to write inoffensive calls for a spiritual and cultural life amidst the world as he found it, which brought on his being being publicly attacked in print by many Germans as a traitor. (WWII he foretold even in the early 20s.)
Hesse would not have called himself a hero; also because such (pretension) is not the task, as he saw it, of a poet. but he did not live in unheroic times.
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