45 - Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry

Summary

The 1930s, construed for the purpose of this chapter as running from 1928 (when Auden’s Poems were privately printed by Stephen Spender) to 1939 (the beginning of the Second World War and the date of Auden’s departure for America), is an era in which fiercely individualist lyric voices emerge from and often in opposition to the complexity-laden bequests of Romantic, Victorian, Symbolist and Modernist poetry. These voices often inflect themselves through the process of responding to ‘history’, to use the period’s domineeringly central term. This chapter will explore the work of three major poets of the 1930s, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, and it will also, towards the close of the section on Auden, touch on the poetic achievement of C. Day Lewis.

W. H. Auden’s early poems crackle with an urgency that can seem admonitory, even sinister. Their very acoustics are remarkable: curt, cold, intense, speaking from the heart’s injuries as well as to the head’s impulse to diagnose. Stephen Spender writes in evocative terms of ‘terse syllables enclosed within a music like the wind in a deserted shaft’. ‘Syllables’ are indeed ‘enclosed within’ the poetry’s ‘music’. Lines spring enigmatically and unforgettably into life, seeming to describe a landscape that is also a place we might meet in our dreams or nightmares. Poems can come across as pages torn from the screenplay of a chilling thriller: ‘They ignored his wires. / The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming’, at the close of the octave of the unrhymed sonnet ‘Control of the passes’ is an example, the assonantally clustered ‘trouble coming’ looming with menace out of and fulfilling the incipient threat imparted to the short-vowelled sounds in ‘ignored’, ‘bridges’, and ‘unbuilt’.