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The Auden Group , or Auden Generation , was a group of British and Irish writers active in the 1930s that included W. H. Auden , Louis MacNeice , Cecil Day-Lewis , Stephen Spender , Christopher Isherwood and sometimes Edward Upward and Rex Warner . They were sometimes called simply the Thirties poets . ^[1]

Overview [ edit ]

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 at Oxford 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 four poets (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 including Dylan Thomas and others who were not associated with the "Auden Group"). The event was so insignificant that Day-Lewis faied 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 annual Oxford Poetry . Auden dedicated books to Isherwood and Spender. Day-Lewis mentioned Auden in a poem, but the whole group never operated as such.

Macspaunday [ edit ]

" MacSpaunday " was a name invented by Roy Campbell , ^[2] in his Talking Bronco (1946), to designate a composite figure made up of the four poets:

• Louis MacNeice ("Mac")
• Stephen Spender ("sp")
• W. H. Auden ("au-n")
• Cecil Day-Lewis ("day")

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".

References [ edit ]

• Carter, Ronald (1984), ed. Thirties poets: the "Auden Group": a casebook . London: Macmillan. ISBN   0-333-29329-0 .
• Poster, Jem (1993). The thirties poets . Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. ISBN   0-335-09663-8

External links [ edit ]

• MediaDrome article

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