Commentary on the Poetry of W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Louis Macneice and Stephen Spender

While literary critics have given disproportionate attention to the work of Auden and MacNeice, this commentary gives equal attention to their contemporaries Day Lewis and Spender. The author brings fresh insights to their poetry, identifies undetected sources, and elucidates obscurities. By placing their poetry in its biographical and historical contexts, he demonstrates how four poets with similar social and educational backgrounds responded to the stresses of private life and uneasy times, while remaining continuously aware of each other's work. His chronological survey of their entire poetic output over sixty years dispels the notion that their chief interest is as representative writers of a single decade, "the thirties".