The previous chapter argues that though there were subtle differences of political emphasis between MacNeice, Day Lewis and Spender, their writing of the early 1930s responds to analogous pressures. With Poems, MacNeice begins to define his own artistic agenda and to differentiate his work from that of his contemporaries. The volume's concern with the tensions between the individual and the group and within the routine and the mundane anticipates the lighter poetry of the late 1930s. In this work, the compromise between the ambition to ‘make it new’ and the ideal of a democratic poetic practice is at its clearest. This chapter investigates the intellectual and political backgrounds to MacNeice's lighter work through Auden's pioneering redefinition of lightness. By considering MacNeice's response to this, I stress his emerging independence from even the most pre-eminent of his contemporaries. While Letters from Iceland and I Crossed the Minch show MacNeice gathering strength from Auden's example, Autumn Journal demonstrates this new poetic at its furthest reach, juxtaposing the public with the private to communicate the manifold crises of 1938.

In the second half of the decade, the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) between the democratically elected Popular Front government and Franco's right-wing nationalist rebels came to embody the broader ideological struggle between progressive and reactionary forces. Hynes suggests that for the British literary left, the war was initially seen as ‘the first battle in the apocalyptic struggle of Left and Right’ in which ‘Good was striking back at Evil’. Auden's notorious ‘Spain’ preserves the vestiges of such optimism. Yet Spain quickly became symbolic of disappointment and disaffection. Reflecting on a holiday visit in 1936 in the bleaker context of 1938, MacNeice wrote that he left ‘not realising/ That Spain would soon denote/ Our grief, our aspirations’ (CP 114). The volumes Day Lewis and Spender published in 1938 and 1939 record their declining confidence in communism and the outcome of the war in Spain. Day Lewis's Overtures to Death is frankly pessimistic from its title onwards. War is conceived of as an inevitable pseudo-sexual climax: bombers’ ‘wombs […] ache to be rid of death’. Conversely, phallic ‘big guns […] plant death in your world's soft womb’: the German airstrikes which have destroyed Spanish cities ‘will grow nearer home’ (CPDL 269, 270).