Auden’s poetry and ideology were shaped by each era and circumstance in which he lived and worked and by those by whom he was surrounded. His early views on politics, religion, sexuality, and the importance of art, music, and poetry to society – all of which defined the poet as Britten knew him in the 1930s and early 1940s – underwent some form of revision thereafter, providing fodder for those critics who sought to conscript him to the turbulent period leading up to and including the Second World War, hailed by many as the ‘golden age’ of his poetry. In England, particularly, some scholars have posited that Auden’s rejection of his ‘age’ – and his country in 1939 – did damage to both his contemporary and posthumous reputations, going so far as to posit that he had squandered his opportunity to be considered that nation’s greatest poet of the twentieth century. As this chapter explores, Auden’s outlook on the varying matters that crept into his poetry was complex and often contradictory.

Britten’s early love for the cinema - when he was spellbound in particular by the work of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers - and his later apprenticeship as a composer for documentary films in the 1930s are both charted in this chapter, which analyses his comments on the medium in his youthful letters and diaries and goes on to consider the impact film music had on his later stylistic development as a composer of works for the stage. High points of his own work in film include his scores for the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, including two celebrated collaborations with the poet W. H. Auden (Coal Face, 1935; Night Mail, 1936), his score for the feature film Love from a Stranger (1937), and his virtuosic orchestral music for Muir Mathieson’s educational film Instruments of the Orchestra (1946). The chapter concludes with an account of Britten’s close involvement with his own local cinema in Aldeburgh during the late 1960s.