14
PARTISAN REVIEW
The concern for England's glory thus, re-entered serious poetry, from
which it had been absent for a generation. T. S. Eliot, to
be
sure, had tried
to foster certain institutional revivals; but these were directed, not towards
a strictly English resurgence, but towards implicating Britain in a renais–
sance of the Latin internationalism of the medieval system. Auden was not
interested in institutions but in
inspiration,-
in the revival of libidinal
energy as a cure for English crime, disease and fear of life. The healer
replaced the priest in his conception, and for the Dantesque spirituality of
Eliot he would have substituted the primitive Anglo-Saxon stoicism of Gisli
the Outlaw. Rejecting Eliot's tradition, he also discarded the international
style, and working from Skelton and the sagas he developed the hard,
compact, de-Iatinized austerities of his early manner. Day Lewis also showed
nationalistic tendencies in that period, but he was far less radical than
Auden. He merely sought to restore England's glory through reviving the
cult of fresh air and natural magic; and from Hopkins and the English
Romantics he compounded his famous nougat-paste style. Other writers
who have since become identified with Auden's circle had no traffic with
this English revivalism. Louis MacNeice was too much the cosmopolitan
Irishman, and Stephen Spender too deeply rooted in a family tradition of
liberal idealism. And in 1933 the anti-fascist movement intervened to arrest
the nationalistic tendencies of Auden and Lewis and to bring the group
together on a common political basis.
"The Rupert Brooke of the Depression"
Stephen Spender and his fellow poets have ranged through English
literature in search of "ancestors"; but the Freudian censor appears to have
been at work in them, for they have studiously ignored Shaw, Wells, and
Rupert Brooke, who are is so many respects their true antecedents.
From their early writings it is clear that communism first appealed to
them as a possible solution for their own intellectual dilemmas. Politically,
Stephen Spender matured more rapidly than the others. Somewhat
manque
as a poet, he has nevertheless the gift of logic, of drawing general conclu–
sions from his experience, and of discarding ideas when they no longer fit
in with what he observes. Where MacNeice, ideologically speaking, exhib–
its no progression whatever, and Auden shuttles continually back and
forth between two fixed points, Spender's work falls readily into a pattern
of development, simple but pronounced.
His earliest verse, invoking Time, Death and Frustration, speaks the
usual language of introversion. His first social emotion appears in such
poems as "The Port" and "The Prisoners": it is an emotion of pity: pity
for the mad, the poor, the confined. He is trying to bring to bear on the
Crisis the detached compassion with which Wilfred Owen had endured the
