The Auden Group or the Auden Generation is a group of British and Irish writers active in the 1930s that included

W. H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...

Louis MacNeice Frederick Louis MacNeice (12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963) was an Irish poet and playwright, and a member of the Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely a ...

, Cecil Day-Lewis,

Stephen Spender Sir Stephen Harold Spender (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the ...

, Christopher Isherwood, and sometimes

Edward Upward Edward Falaise Upward, FRSL (9 September 1903 – 13 February 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer who, prior to his death, was believed to be the UK's oldest living author. Initially gaining recognition amongst the Auden Group as ...

and

Rex Warner Rex Warner (9 March 1905 – 24 June 1986) was an English classicist, writer, and translator. He is now probably best remembered for ''The Aerodrome'' (1941).Chris Hopkins, ''English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History'' Continuum Inte ...

. They were sometimes called simply the Thirties poets (see "References").

Overview

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 Oxbridge is a portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge, the two oldest, wealthiest, and most famous universities in the United Kingdom. The term is used to refer to them collectively, in contrast to other British universities, and more broadly to de ...

, 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 A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

, 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 Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion", as well as the "play for voices" ''Under ...

and others who were not associated with the "Auden Group"). This event was so insignificant that Day-Lewis evidently forgot it had occurred 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

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

("Mac") *

("sp") *

("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

* Carter, Ronald (1984), ed. ''Thirties poets: the "Auden Group": a casebook''. London: Macmillan. . * Poster, Jem (1993). ''The thirties poets''. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

External links

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