Michael O'Neill

University of Nottingham | Notts · School of Politics and International Relations

‘See Spain and see the world’: the sentence is Rex Warner’s and opens the last stanza of ‘The Tourist Looks at Spain’. In Poems for Spain (1939), edited by Stephen Spender and John Lehmann, the poem concludes the section entitled ‘The Map’ (begun by Auden’s ‘Spain’ to which Warner’s panoramic quatrains appear to be indebted). Warner’s poem inclines...

Autumn Journal is distinguished by its voice. Unless this is appreciated the poem will not seem to rise above the level of very good journalism; indeed, too many readers have taken their cue from MacNeice himself when, ten years after composing it, he declared that ‘after Autumn Journal I tired of journalism’ (SCM, p. 161). The poem can be heard as...

‘They were extremely non-political with half of themselves and extremely political with the other half’ (‘Background to the Thirties’, in The Thirties and After, p. 18). Is Spender’s judgement about the poets of the thirties relevant to his own work? This chapter attempts an answer; it begins by considering some of the more overtly political or pro...

Stephen Spender once claimed to find ‘a dualistic idea running through all [Auden’s] work which encloses it like the sides of a box. This idea is Symptom and Cure’.1 Certainly Auden’s major poems of the thirties often seek both to diagnose and suggest ways of healing psychological and political ills. The ‘dualistic idea’ noted by Spender is evident...

Anyone who wishes to make substantial claims for the poetry which Stephen Spender wrote in the 1930s confronts a widespread misconception and a practical problem. The misconception is the view of the poems as little more than footnotes to an unusually interesting literary life. Spender himself has partly, if inadvertently, encouraged this view, des...

Few would dispute that Auden’s early poetry is arresting, but there is less agreement as to why.1 Does it arrest in spite or because of the ellipses, rhetorical effects, posings, disruptions, syntactical swervings, dislocations, obscurities? Is it better or worse for the fact that, in Justin Replogle’s words, its author seems to have ‘often cared m...

Disorientation is essential to the experience of reading The Orators.1 Everett’s confession to finding the work ‘almost impenetrably obscure’ (Everett, p. 27) is truer to its nature than Mendelson’s demonstration that there is a ‘hidden key’ (a paper by Auden’s friend, the anthropologist John Layard), and that it is ‘possible to reconstruct the ori...

MacNeice praised Auden for being ‘one of the few living poets whose poetry can walk in the street without falling flat on its face’, and he wrote that ‘language cannot be divorced from some sort of social world’. Out of this belief came his emphasis on everyday utterance, which is always potentially poetic: ‘Ordinary conversation is nearer to lyric...

Auden an altering speech Spender the sense of falling light MacNeice turning the music on Auden "The Orators" - they stole to force a hearing Spender to will this time's change Auden a change of heart MacNeice "Autumn Journal" - a monologue is the death of language poetry of the Spanish Civil War - see Spain and see the world.