Forties poetry: definitions and defences

The political events of 1939 – the fall of the Spanish Republic, the Stalin–Hitler Pact and the outbreak of the Second World War – delivered a body-blow to the authority of the Audenesque style which had dominated thirties poetry. In January 1939 W. H. Auden (1907–73) himself had emigrated to the USA, and a shift from socio-political engagement to self-assessment and retrospection was discernible in his work as well as that of his followers. Those journals which had championed the Audenesque style, Twentieth Century Verse and New Verse, were wound up. Suddenly it was clear that events had outstripped even the direst prophecies of this poetry, insofar as these were cast in a realist style and rooted in a belief in the efficacy of rationality and collective action.

The sense of a sea-change in taste was confirmed by the publication of an anthology, The New Apocalypse (1939), edited by Henry Treece (1911–66) and J. F. Hendry (1912–86). Treece and Hendry spoke for a new poetic grouping (to which the anthology gave its name) which advocated an individualist, metaphysical, richly lyrical, anti-Audenesque poetic. Along with work by the group members, the anthology included poems by their chief inspiration, Dylan Thomas (1914–53), who, in Auden’s absence, soon came to be regarded as the leading young British poet. Journals sympathetic to New Apocalypse appeared, among them Wrey Gardiner’s Poetry Quarterly (1939–53) and M. J. Tambimuttu’s Poetry (London) (1939–49). It was felt that, in Cyril Connolly’s words, ‘The flight of Auden . . . is also a symptom of the failure of social realism as an aesthetic doctrine . . . a reaction away from social realism is as necessary and as salutary as was, a generation ago, the reaction from the ivory tower.’