Few writers have registered the imperative to be (or at least seem) new as intensely as the poets of the 1930s. MacNeice's ‘Hidden Ice’ begins ‘There are few songs for domesticity/ For routine work, money-making or scholarship’, then eulogizes those neglected endeavours: ‘I would praise our inconceivable stamina/ Who work to the clock and calendar’. Though this praise is modified by ‘hidden ice or currents no one noted’ which can undermine the most routine lives, this text encapsulates the ambition to expand the subject matter of poetry which was shared by all three writers (CP 89-90). Similar novelty is apparent in Spenders ‘The Pylons’. The shock value of this text lies in its lavishing of a traditional style on what was widely perceived as a symbol of the modern brutalization of the English landscape. Spender juxtaposes the aggressive assertiveness of the pylons - ‘Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret’ - with the pastoral landscape they have colonized, aligning them with ‘the quick perspective of the future’ (NCP 21). Whether or not Spender's poem is an unproblematic endorsement of a technological utopia, it implies that modern poetry should address modern subjects. Since poetry is still widely supposed to be a ‘green’ art form which sides with Nature rather than Technology, ‘The Pylons’ remains controversial. The next two chapters consider the novelty of the poets of the 1930s. This chapter examines how they responded to and reacted against the prevailing literary culture of their time, and explores the differences of poetic and political outlook in work published between 1933 and 1935.

In surveys of the decade, Samuel Hynes, Bernard Bergonzi and Valentine Cunningham have seen MacNeice as a significant figure, yet one who lacks the centrifugal and period-defining magnetism of Auden. Adrian Caesar's revisionist account sees MacNeice as another Oxbridge bourgeois who contributes to the formulation of an ‘Auden myth’ which has distracted attention from more politically radical poets like Jack Lindsay and Hugh MacDiarmid. Studies which concentrate on MacNeice have tended, especially in recent years, to emphasize his differences from his English friends and contemporaries. MacNeice's Irishness has become an important issue for the reading of his 1930s poetry.