Responding in 1932 to an enquiry from Geoffrey Grigson, Wystan Auden asked 'Why do you want to start a poetry review [?]', adding 'I'm glad you like poetry but cant [sic] we take it a little more lightly . . . I hope you'll keep it gay.'

There are enough instances of Auden's play with this last word to suggest that it already, by the 1930s, had some of its modern resonance, at least as a coded formula among those in the know. The satiric verse epistle, 'Letter to Lord Byron' (1937), for example, approved Byron's muse 'because she's gay and witty'. Byron's bisexuality would have been an open secret in Auden's circles, which included Harold Nicolson, author of a 1924 biography of the poet, and Peter Quennell, whose Byron in Italy would appear in four years' time. Certainly, in the 1930s many of the attacks on Auden's 'gaiety', his lightness and unseriousness of tone, linked it surreptitiously to a hinted moral 'deviancy'. Thus F. R. Leavis, reviewing Poems in 1931, wrote of Auden's 'combination of seriousness and flippancy' being in a mould 'so peculiar to himself and so eccentric in its terminology', displaying 'mental idiosyncrasies . . . extravagantly indulged', that it 'fails to make a living contact with us'.