Exile's Return:
The most intriguing part of the reading in my opinion was the section entitled: Mansions in the air. Towards the end Cowley speaks about what he thinks was the final effect from the war . He describes it as " the honest emotion behind a pretentious phrase like "the lost generations". Cowley speaks about feeling uprooted both physically and spiritually and "scattered among strange people". i want to focus particularly on the part where he says they were "infected with the poison of irresponsibility- the poison of travel too, for we had learned that problems could be left behind us merely by moving elsewhere". I find it interesting that he would describe their nomadic lifestyle as being a poison. one definition of poison is: a substance with an inherent property that tends to destroy life. Cowley ends this section speaking about how they returned to New York and speaks describing it as the "homeland of the uprooted" and he no longer has the view point of the lifestyle being a poison but now it was simply back to their normal lifestyle. Later Cowley explains the effects of that lifestyle. (46-47)