The poetry of the Thirties
W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden(1907–1973) and his Oxford friends Stephen Spender
(1909–1998), Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) and Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–1972) were
briefly left-wing poets; their rapid success provoked the South African poet Roy
Campbell to attack a composite monster, MacSpaunday. They had missed the war
and had no jobs to lose. Guilty about privilege, the idea of equality, even of revolu-
tion, appealed.Political camps
A political sketch is required here, for attitudes to Nazism and Communism can still
affect accounts of the literature of these generations. Enlightened opinion favoured
the Russian experiment, overlooking its atrocities. Better-known was the Nazi
suppression of the Communists, especially to Auden and his friends Christopher
Isherwood (1904–1986) and Stephen Spender, who had visited Berlin and Weimar
Germany, the frenetic life of which is caught in Isherwood’s novel Mr Norris Changes
Tr ains, dedicated to W. H. Auden. This deft and skilful novel, defining a particular
place and time, has not itself dated. The Berlin it observes is corrupt, sordid, comic:
full of betrayals and sexual weakness of every kind. Like other thirties’ fiction
(Grahame Greene’s, for example), it employs a film noirfo rmat and a detached
humour and pathos. Mr Norris is a con-man, blackmailer and spy; admiration is
reserved for the communist organizer, killed by the Nazis.
Several of the Auden group visited Spain; they supported the Republicans. But
Auden noticed that the Republicans had closed the churches, and asked himself why
he felt that this was wrong. A second question, about the source of his certainty that
Hitler was evil, eventually led him back to Christianity.
In 1939, the year of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Auden and Isherwood left for New York,
amid jeers. Many in the Auden circle were homosexual: he joked about the
‘Homintern’ (a reference to Comintern, the Communist International movement).
Cecil Day-Lewis published a sonnet in Left Review in 1934 beginning, ‘Yes, why do
we all, seeing a communist, feel small?’ By 1936 some of the ‘we’ did not. Most
reverted from Communism to a social-democratic liberalism. Of the early Thirties,
MacNeice was to write, ‘Young men were swallowing Marx with the same naive
enthusiam that made Shelley swallow Godwin’ (The Strings are False, 1965). Day-
Lewis is remembered for his versions of Virgil. He became Laureate in 1968, and
Spender was knighted for services to literature. Isherwood was clever, MacNeice very
talented, Auden more than talented.W. H. Auden
MacNeice wrote an open, journalistic, colloquial verse of his own, notably in
Autumn Journal,about 1938–9; it is a uniquely successful extended experiment in
ver se journalism,easily catching the surfaces and idioms of the time, while lightly
suggesting deeper things. It requires lengthy quotation to establish its qualities, but
will surely last. The others did some ‘Pylon poetry’ – so called after a futuristic poem
ofSpender’s – full of pistons and aerodromes. Their modern ballads were better,
especially MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’ (The Earth Compels, 1938): ‘All we want is a
bank-balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi’. Auden’s ‘Spain 1937’ ends two of its stanzas
‘But to-day the struggle’, the slogan of the Communists. The tone is strikingly unlike
that in which Yeats, thinking of Pegasus, the winged horse of poetry of Greek366 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55