|  Last
week was a seasonal theme. Before that, we had old age; and before
that we had eyes. In the pattern of these pieces, you will no
doubt expect that this week we would discuss a poet – or a group
of poets. In this last category, we have written about the Lake
poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; the Cockneys: Shelley,
Keats, Hazlitt, and Hunt; and the Pre-Raphaelites: Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Christina Rosetti, and William Morris.
This week, I would like to discuss a group called MacSpaunday.
This name results from an assembly of the names of the group:
Louis MacNeice (1907 – 1963); Stephen Harold Spender ( 1909 -
); Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973); and Cecil Day-Lewis (1904
– 1972). The name was attached to them by Roy Campbell (1901 –
1957), who did not care for them. Campbell was a South African,
who led, to say the least of it, an interesting if short life.
This is an epigram of his On Some South African Novelists:
You praise the firm restraint with which they write –
I’m with you there, of course:
They use the snaffle and the curb all right,
But where’s the bloody horse?
As will become clear later, he profoundly differed from the group’s
political orientation.
Alain Blayac remarked, in his 1993 article Berlin, Vienna:
Images of the City in the British Literature of the30s:
“If Spender, Isherwood (and the so-called MacSpaunday set in
general) achieved preeminence, it is not because they were more
talented than their seniors or contemporaries, but essentially
because they had conjured up the genius loci, captured the zeitgeist,
the spirit of the age. Evelyn Waugh, who disliked them intensely,
paid them a reluctant and perhaps involuntary tribute when he
complained that they had ‘captured the decade.’”
 MacNeice
was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland; Spender was born in London;
Day-Lewis was born in County Leix, Ireland; and Auden was born
in Yorkshire, England. They met in the University of Oxford, as
many others of the groups of English poets did.
The work that they produced was described as “the New Poetry of
the 1930s”. Depending on who you read, this was variously described:
MacNeice: “Low-keyed, unpoetic, socially committed, and topical
verse”. Spender: “Politically conscience-stricken leftist ‘new
writing’”. Auden: “Hero of the left”. Day-Lewis: “Poetry of left-wing
political statement”.
Their careers immediately following their days at Oxford are
interesting: MacNeice was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham,
and at the Bedford College for Women, London; Spender spent several
months in the period 1930 – 33 with Christopher Isherwood (1904
– 1986) in Berlin. Day-Lewis taught in schools until 1935. Auden
spent a year after graduating in 1928 with Isherwood; then spent
five years teaching in schools in Scotland and England. Teaching
was always Auden’s bent, and T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) wasn’t
happy about the influence he perceived it having on Auden’s poetry:
''One tires of having things explained and being preached at.''
During the period while they were at Oxford and in the years
immediately following, the Weimar republic was gradually coming
apart in Germany, and the National Socialist ‘Nazi’ party was
becoming stronger under the leadership of Adolph Hitler (1889
– 1945). Isherwood’s novels describe this in considerable detail.
Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945) created the Fascist party in Italy,
and took power in 1922; his brutal invasion of Ethiopia in the
teeth of world opinion took place in 1935. In Spain the Nationalist
Party of Francisco Franco (1892 - 1975) was on the rise, and after
the election of a left-wing Popular Front majority in Spain’s
first democratic election in 1931 he pursued a path which led
to the Spanish Civil War, 1936 – 1939; the brutality associated
with this again received international condemnation, and many
British intellectuals went to Spain to join the Populists, or
Republicans. Interestingly, Roy Campbell, who gave the MacSpaunday
label to the group we are discussing today, fought with the Nationalists.
 Against
these right-wing movements, the only significant opposition was
coming from the socialist parties, most importantly the communist
parties based on the political theories of Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)
and Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895), which were developed during
their time in England. Engels was the son of a textile manufacturer,
and after managing a factory in Manchester, England, he wrote
his first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in
England in 1844 (1845). Marx moved to England in 1848, following
the failure of revolutions in Europe, and lived in London. He
earned some money as a correspondent for the New York Tribune
but depended on Engels' financial help while working on his monumental
work Das Kapital (3 vol., 1867-94), in which he used dialectical
materialism to analyze economic and social history; Engels edited
vol. 2 and 3 after Marx's death.
The growth of support for left-wing revolutionary theories in
much of Europe really began following the Russian Revolution in
1917, led by the Russian Marxist, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870
– 1924). The perception at the time was that the socialist model
adopted in Russia (Lenin pointed out that the structure was not
Communism, but a first stage towards the development of a true
communist society) was an enormous improvement on the Tzarist
regime that it had overthrown, particularly for the working class.
This intellectual honeymoon was increasingly eroded by the later
actions of Joseph Stalin (1879 – 1953) and essentially disappeared
on the signing of the Stalin – Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 at the
beginning of World War II.
It should be remembered that there had been a strong anti-Royalist
part of English society, particularly in the Universities, for
many years. The Lake poets, for example, were united by their
Republican beliefs, and their admiration for the immediate post-revolution
society in France; it didn’t take long for their admiration to
be destroyed by the rise of Napoleon. However, it should also
be remembered how much opprobrium was heaped on Robert Southey
because of what was seen as his joining the traditionalists later
in life.
It is scarcely surprising at such a time that a group of young
poets should support leftist beliefs: it would have been more
surprising if they hadn’t.
 Auden
appears to have published the first poem of this group, in 1924:
it was in Public School Verse. Auden was also the first
of this group to have a collection published. It was hand-printed
in 1928 by the other three in his final year at Oxford. MacNeice’s
first collection was Blind Fireworks, published in 1929.
This was also the year that Day-Lewis’s first collection was published:
Transitional Poems. Spender’s first collection. came at
the end of his period with Isherwood in 1933: Poems.
They appear by all accounts to have been a pleasant bunch. MacNeice
was described as having intellectual honesty, Celtic exuberance,
and sardonic humor. Spender was described as having a self-critical,
compassionate personality.
As was still common at that period, they also were excellent
translators: MacNeice translated Horace and Aeschylus: he published
a translation of Agamemnon in 1936. Spender was greatly
influenced by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)
and the Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca (1898 – 1936) who
was shot to death at night without trial by the Nationalists.
Day-Lewis published a verse translation of Virgil’s Aeneid
in 1952.
Cecil Day-Lewis turned eventually from left-wing political statements
to an individual lyricism expressed in more traditional forms.
He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1951 to 1956. In 1968
he was appointed Poet Laureate, following John Masefield. He also
wrote some successful detective novels under the nom de plume
Nicholas Blake.
Auden is generally regarded now as by far the greatest poet of
the four, although this appears to have been less than obvious
at the beginning. In 1966, he published Collected Shorter Poems,
1927 – 1957, and in the introduction his career is divided
into four sections. The first was from 1927 to 1932; and the most
important work in this period was probably his verse play, or
‘charade’ Paid on Both Sides which was published in 1930
in T. S. Eliot’s periodical The Criterion. This helped
establish his reputation. In the period 1933 – 1938 he was the
hero of the left; his verse became more open, accessible to a
wider public. The important collection from this period was Look,
Stranger. During the period 1939 – 1946 his views changed
towards a formal Protestant Christianity; by 1941 he was on the
verge of a commitment; this had been his mother’s faith. The period
1948 – 1957, and indeed onward from that, was marked by a several
major publications.
So that is our subject for this week: a left-wing political
quartet of poets concerned with what they saw as the decay of
civilization following the first world war, and the move towards
brutal right-wing oppressive regimes. In view of what happened
next, one can scarcely say they were wrong! Whether their chosen
direction towards a revolutionary form of socialism was the correct
path is less clear: one can argue that Western civilization escaped
the abyss more as a result of democratic socialism of the kind
that describes certainly most of the European countries at the
moment. But I can imagine that others would argue for capitalism.
I suppose we shall see in the distant future where the truth lies.
Or some of us will.
I am going to select poems that were first chosen by William
Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) for the Oxford Book of Modern Verse
1892 – 1935, published in 1936. Because we have four poets
this week, and we only print three poems during the week, I’m
going to include one in this piece. I have decided to use Cecil
Day-Lewis’s Come live with me and be my Love, because the
quote from Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593) The
Passionate Shepherd to his Love is both amusing and appropriate
for Day-Lewis’s more bitter message:
Come, live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
Of peace and plenty, bed and board,
That chance employment may afford.
I’ll handle dainties on the docks
And thou shalt read of summer frocks:
At evening by the sour canals
We’ll hope to hear some madrigals.
Care on thy maiden brow shall put
A wreath of wrinkles, and thy foot
Be shod with pain: not silken dress
But toil shall tire thy loveliness.
Hunger shall make thy modest zone
And cheat fond death of all but bone –
If these delight thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
My first poem of the week will be Auden’s It’s
no use raising a Shout. I like the refrain-like couplet
repeated at the end of each stanza. The second poem will be Stephen
Spender’s The
Shapes of Death, which is politically very explicit. Our
Final poem this week is by MacNeice. I had thought of using The
Individualist speaks, but I have decided to use instead the
more explicit Turf-stacks to reinforce the message of this
quartet of angry young men.
I hope you like them. We are getting closer to the present in
this series in more ways than one.
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