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“Five Hundred a Year and a Room of One's Own”*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

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Extract

In 1934, There appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature a poem entitled, “Audenspender.”

A new double-ender

Is Auden and Spender:

Or, beggin' your pawdon,

Is Spender and Auden.

A team out of Oxon.,

Like anti and toxin,

But damned hard to render

Is 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 Leo

For guts, glue and gender,

Read Auden and Spender.

Old seethings are seether

In both or in either,

When new strings are sawed on

By Spenderized Auden.

There's treason, there's terror,

Love, reason, and error:

You'd toughen the tender,

O Audenized Spender!

In one or the other

It's poetry, brother:

The best bones are knawed on

By Spender, by Auden.

Have you a rheumatic

Old aunt in the attic?

God save her, defend her,

From Auden and Spender

Indeed, 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Summer 1973 , pp. 128 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1973

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Footnotes

*

Revised edition of a paper read to the Conference on British Studies. Pacific Northwest section, Eugene, Oregon, March 1973.

References

1 McCord, David, “Audenspender,” Saturday Review of Literature, XI (December, 1934):367.Google Scholar

2 Spender, Stephen, “It Began at Oxford,” New York Times Book Review, March 13, 1955, p. 174Google Scholar

3 Orwell, George, “Inside the Whale,” A Collection of Essays (Garden City, N. Y., 1954), p. 238.Google Scholar

4 Scarfe, Francis, W. H. Auden (Monoco, 1949), p. 12.Google Scholar

5 Sitwell, Edith, Poetry and Criticism (New York, 1926), p. 36Google Scholar. Edith Sitwell did not, however, completely omit political and social concerns from her poetry. Indeed, her famous Gold Coast Customs carried a secondary theme which was rather bitterly anticapitalist.

But their hands and head

Are machines to breed

Gold for the old and greedy Dead.

See Sitwell, Edith, Gold Coast Customs (Boston, 1929), p. 25Google Scholar. But Miss Sitwell did not publish any of her poetry again until 1939, thus appearing to leave a political and social emphasis of poetry to the thirties poets.

6 Connolly, Cyril, Enemies of Promise (London, 1938), pp. 7172.Google Scholar

7 Spender, Stephen, “The English Intellectuals and the World of To-day,” Twentieth Century (June, 1951):483.Google Scholar

8 Keynes, John Maynard, Two Memoirs (London, 1949), p. 82.Google Scholar

9 Stansky, Peter and Abrahams, William, Journey to the Frontier (Boston, 1966), pp. 1920.Google Scholar

10 Wooft, Virginia, A Room of One's Own (New York, 1929), p. 191.Google Scholar

11 Auden, W. H., The Dog Beneath the Skin (London, 1935), p. 138.Google Scholar

12 Daiches, David, The Present Age, 1920-Present (London, 1958), p. 2.Google Scholar

13 Woolf, Leonard, Downhill All the Way (London, 1967, p. 27.Google Scholar

14 Allen, Walter, The English Novel (New York, 1954), p. 11.Google ScholarPubMed

15 Spender, Stephen, The Destructive Element (London, 1935), p. 17.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., pp. 129-31.

17 Ibid., p. 181.

18 Roberts, Michael, “The Dignity of English Thought,” Essays by Diverse Hands, ed. Ervine, John (London, 1940), p. 164.Google Scholar

19 Spender, , The Destructive Element, p. 20.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., p. 229.

21 Spender, Stephen, World Within World (Berkeley, 1960), p. 62.Google Scholar

22 Auden, W. H. and Garrett, John, eds., The Poet's Tongue (London, 1935), p. x.Google Scholar

23 Roberts, Michael, “Note on English Poetry,” Poetry, XXXIX (February, 1932):272.Google Scholar

24 Auden, W. H., The Oxford Book of Light Verse (Oxford, 1938), p. vii.Google Scholar

25 Auden, and Garrett, , The Poet's Tongue, p. viii.Google Scholar

26 Spender, Stephen, “Movements and Influences in English Literature 1927-1952,” Books Abroad, XXVIII (1953):532.Google Scholar

27 Spender, , The Destructive Element, p. 189.Google Scholar

28 Powell, Dylys, Descent from Parnassus (New York, 1934), pp. 169–72.Google Scholar

29 Roberts, Michael, “Threshold of the Desert,” Adelphi, I (December 3, 1930):252.Google Scholar

30 Powell, , Descent from Parnassus, p. 219.Google Scholar

31 Lewis, Cecil Day, A Hope for Poetry (Oxford. 1934), p. 26.Google Scholar