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“Five Hundred a Year and a Room of One's Own”*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
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.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1973
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
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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.
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