1 Subject: ENGLISH Class: B.A. Part 1 English Hons., Paper-1, Group B Topic: THE AUDEN GROUP Lecture No: 20 By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email:
[email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No: 9934917117 “THE AUDEN GROUP” INTRODUCTION • The Auden Group or the Auden Generation is a group of British and Irish writers active in the 1930s that included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Christopher Isherwood. • The Auden Group is also sometimes referred to as the Nineteen Thirties Poets or The Oxford Poets who represented a new, more experimental literary style. • All the poets knew one another, and most had been educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, all sharing vaguely left-wing viewpoints. The writers associated with the grouping—W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day- 2 Lewis, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood never gathered together in the same room, nor shared any coherent poetic or literary values. • Rather, the poets connected individually, particularly through Auden, who collaborated several times with both Isherwood and MacNeice, and wrote with Day-Lewis an introduction to the annual Oxford Poetry. • In the public mind, the individuals continued to be linked, with poet Roy Campbell referring to “MacSpaunday” in his 1946 work, Talking Bronco, a word created from the names of MacNeice (Mac), Spender (sp), Auden (au- n), and Day-Lewis (day). • The English Poetry of 1930s is primarily recognized as the poetry of leftist philosophy. The poets during this period were highly influenced by the philosophy of Karl Marx and his followers.