Poets of the 1930s: what inspired them?

The 1930s saw an explosion of poetic activity in Great Britain, with poets such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day Lewis coming to the fore. There were several factors that linked the “Thirties Poets”, and most of them were known to each other and other literary and artistic figures of the time, even if they were less well known to the public at large.

They were, for example, almost all attracted to the Left in politics despite coming from privileged backgrounds. They were the generation that had been of school age during the First World War and had therefore come to know of its horrors second-hand, for example through the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others. They were therefore protest poets of a different kind from the previous generation.

So what were the influences that inspired these poets to write? What was it about the 1930s that would not allow this small coterie of talented writers to stay silent?

We can define the Thirties as the period between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. The first event produced economic shockwaves that had huge consequences across the world, and the second was, in some ways, the ultimate consequence, although many other factors contributed to the second major cataclysm of the 20^th century.

The 1930s saw the rise of Fascism in Europe, clashing head-on with Communism in a number of arenas, most notably Spain, where civil war broke out in 1936 and attracted a number of British intellectuals to fight on the Communist side. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, posing serious questions to the democracies of Europe as to how they should react. In Italy, where Fascism as such was born, another totalitarian dictator, Benito Mussolini, took his country to war in 1935 by invading Abyssinia.

A number of the Thirties poets had direct experience of the rise of the Nazis in Germany. W. H. Auden went to live in Germany on leaving Oxford University in 1928 and was joined there by Christopher Isherwood (a prose writer whose works inspired the musical “Cabaret”) in 1929. Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Edward Upward also had first-hand experience of 1930s Germany, and their anti-fascism and consequent pro-communism were the result of that experience.

On the home front, the interplay of the forces of right and left was also being played out in the 1930s. It was widely agreed that Liberalism was failing. It had not produced a “land fit for heroes” after the end of World War One, and Britain was governed for a time by a coalition of parties that seemed unable to take the country forward in any particular direction. For a young person who wanted answers and a sense of purpose, the choice had to be towards one extreme or the other.

Oswald Mosley had been a Labour MP, but he formed his “New Party” in 1931 that, as soon became clear, was a British Nazi party. At first, some intellectuals were attracted by Mosley’s no-nonsense approach. These included W. H. Auden, but he and others were soon repelled by the thuggery that Mosley’s “Blackshirts” demonstrated on the streets of London, especially towards Jews and immigrants.

The alternative was the politics of the Left. The Labour Party, under Ramsay Macdonald, was discredited because it had thrown in its lot with the Liberals and Conservatives in the National Government, so other parties of the left that presented a more openly Marxist front were far more attractive. The story of the connections between British poets and intellectuals and the various factions of the far left is a complex one, not least because Marxist cliques and parties, then as now, rarely present a united front and the scene is forever a shifting one. However, none of the poets of the Thirties was right-wing in attitude, and none of them was apolitical.

Another factor that pushed the poets towards Communism was their general admiration for the young Soviet Union, led by Stalin. Here was a state, built on a political philosophy that they admired, that was succeeding while the West was failing. It has to be remembered that, although several of them had direct experience of Berlin under Hitler, they did not have the same familiarity with life under Stalin’s regime. Indeed, the full story of how Soviet Communism actually worked, with its show trials and mass starvations, was unknown to all but a very select few until many years later.

What the poets and intellectuals did know about was conditions in their own country. Economic depression inevitably leads to unemployment, which hits the poorest hardest. During the Thirties, this led to a massive North-South divide, because the industries that suffered most from changes in world conditions were predominantly based in the North. In 1934 the town of Jarrow in north-east England (from which the “Jarrow Crusade” was to march to London in 1936) had unemployment of 67.8%. At the same time, unemployment in High Wycombe (in the leafy Home Counties near London) was only 3.3%. The south could even be said to be prosperous not only in relative but in absolute terms, with new light industries springing up and large numbers of substantial semi-detached houses marching out along the high roads in “ribbon development”.

With very few exceptions, the poets and writers of the Thirties had no direct experience of economic deprivation. George Orwell (who described himself as “lower upper middle class”) had no need to make himself poor so that he could write “Down and Out in Paris and London” (1933). The poets were mainly split between public school (i.e. fee-paying) and Oxford and public school and Cambridge. That did not, however, prevent them from having social consciences.

On top of the political and economic conditions of the time, poetic inspiration also came from social changes that became apparent during the decade. Class distinctions were still well defined, but the poets came to regard the middle class as “doomed”, in that its moral certainties were open to question. These in turn had been based on strict applications of religious precepts, which the poets had been subjected to during their schooldays, so a rebellion against humbug, rigidity and sexual Puritanism was hardly to be wondered at.

Other developments included a revolution in terms of popular entertainment. Talking pictures made the cinema a highly popular destination, even for those with little money to spare on leisure activities. Given that most films were American in origin, the influence of American culture began to be felt in Britain.

Dancing was also extremely popular among the lower middle class. Together with the cinema, the “palais de danse” encouraged the habit of “going out”, especially among young adults. For those who preferred to stay at home, such as older people, the loudspeaker radio brought entertainment and world news into the home.

The keyword of the decade must therefore be “awareness”. People of all classes were becoming more aware of life beyond the narrow confines of their work and family. They could see and hear for themselves what was going on, be that in terms of political developments or the cultures of other nations.

For the poets, there was much against which to protest, although the audience for their writings was always a limited one. Poetry had little to do with the mass media, and the works of Auden, MacNeice and Co, warning of disaster ahead, would only have had readers in their hundreds. It was only in the forties that a reasonably large poetry-reading public emerged, by which time the disasters had already occurred. 

© John Welford