In 1934, There appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature a poem entitled, “Audenspender.”A new double-enderIs Auden and Spender:Or, beggin' your pawdon,Is Spender and Auden.A team out of Oxon.,Like anti and toxin,But damned hard to renderIs Auden, is Spender.Their captains forsaken—Pound, Eliot, Aiken—They fire at us broad on,Do Spender and Auden.The gray-bearded trio,Remote now as LeoFor guts, glue and gender,Read Auden and Spender.Old seethings are seetherIn both or in either,When new strings are sawed onBy Spenderized Auden.There's treason, there's terror,Love, reason, and error:You'd toughen the tender,O Audenized Spender!In one or the otherIt's poetry, brother:The best bones are knawed onBy Spender, by Auden.Have you a rheumaticOld aunt in the attic?God save her, defend her,From Auden and SpenderIndeed, the two Oxford poets, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, became acknowledged leaders of a “movement” in English poetry in the 1930's. Other writers associated with the “movement” were Michael Roberts, John Lehmann, Rex Warner, Julian Symons, William Empson, William Plomer, Julian Bell, Charles Madge, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Edward Upward, and Christopher Isherwood. The “movement,” whose members were variously appelled the “Thirties poets,” the “new poets,” the “Oxford Group,” and the “New Signatures poets,” was not an organized, formal movement and its so-called members did not consider themselves a “school” of poets and not all of them went to Oxford.
The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice
