 | This article includes a list ofgeneral references, butit lacks sufficient correspondinginline citations. Please help toimprove this article byintroducing more precise citations.(February 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
TheAuden Group, also calledAuden Generation and sometimes simply theThirties poets, was a group of British and Irish writers active in the 1930s that includedW. H. Auden,Louis MacNeice,Cecil Day-Lewis,Stephen Spender,Christopher Isherwood and sometimesEdward Upward andRex Warner.[1]
Although many newspaper articles and a few books appeared about the "Auden Group", the existence of the group was essentially a journalistic myth, a convenient label for poets and novelists who were approximately the same age, who had been educated atOxford and Cambridge, who had known each other at different times and had more or less left-wing views ranging from MacNeice's political scepticism to Upward's committed communism.
The "group" was never together in the same room: the fourpoets (Auden, Day-Lewis, MacNeice and Spender) were in the same room only once in the 1930s, for a BBC broadcast in 1938 of modern poets (also includingDylan Thomas and others who were not associated with the "Auden Group"). The event was so insignificant that Day-Lewis failed to mention it when he wrote in his autobiography,The Buried Day, that the four were first together in 1953.
The connections between individual writers as friends and collaborators were, however, real. Auden and Isherwood produced three plays and a travel book. Auden and MacNeice collaborated on a travel book. As undergraduates, Auden and Day-Lewis wrote a brief introduction to the annualOxford Poetry. Auden dedicated books to Isherwood and Spender. Day-Lewis mentioned Auden in a poem, but the whole group never operated as such.
"MacSpaunday" was a name invented byRoy Campbell,[2] in hisTalking Bronco (1946), to designate a composite figure made up of the four poets:
Campbell, in common with much literary journalism of the period, imagined that the four were a group of like-minded poets although they shared little but left-wing views in the broadest sense of the word. Campbell elsewhere implied that the four were homosexual, but MacNeice and Day-Lewis were entirely heterosexual.
In later years, the term was sometimes used neutrally, as a synonym for the "Thirties poets" or "the New Poetry of the 1930s".
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link) | This article about a poet from the United Kingdom is astub. You can help Wikipedia byadding missing information. |
