The Thirties Poets at Oxford

Twenty-five years ago, the names of Cecil Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender seemed to go together quite naturally. They were the leading poets of their generation—the poets of social awareness, and (except perhaps for MacNeice) the poets of the Left. Nowadays this connection is disputed and disdained. In a tribute to Louis MacNeice, Auden wrote: "From a literary point of view, the contemporary journalistic linkage of the names of Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, is, and always was, absurd.'" And Day Lewis, in his autobiography, was nearly as emphatic: "... in the sense of a concerted effort by a group of poets to impress themselves upon the public, to write differently from their predecessors or about different subjects, it was not a movement at all. Though Auden, Spender, MacNeice and I have all known each other personally since the mid-Thirties, each of us had not even met all three others till after the publication of New Signatures in 1932, while it was only in 1947 that Anden, Spender and I found ourselves for the first time in one room. We did not know we were a movement until the critics told us we were." One of these critics, one might remark, was the author of A Hope for Poetry—C. Day Lewis. In his foreword of February, 1934, he said: "The object of this book is to make the reader look—or look again—in a certain direction. It is based on the belief that some of the post-war writers, notably W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, are true poets having more in common than mere contemporaneousness ... ." The book goes on to present the Left-Wing movement as the "hope for poetry."