Book description
Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the
Thirties were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by
communalism, by the class-struggle and a passionate belief in poets as
people whose actions are as publically important as their poems. For
them, the Spanish Civil War epitomized the mood of the times, as their
symbolic obsessions were transmuted into tragic reality. But from
within their strongly defined unity of ideals, an astonishingly varied
body of poetry emerged.
Robin Skelton has arranged the poetry to make an illuminating
critical essay of the period, and in his introduction he brilliantly
probes the moods and mores of an intensely troubled and creative decade.
