Though at present it is critically unfashionable to view the early Auden as part of a literary group, during the thirties Auden and a number of his friends considered themselves intimately bound by personal, literary, and political ties. The notion of a group plays an extraordinarily important role in Auden’s early poetry. The underlying sociopolitical structure of The Orators is that of the group—much of its considerable obscurity is attributable to this fact and to the related circumstance that its primary audience was the Auden group. Two keys to understanding The Orators, namely its foundation on the psychological “theories” of Homer Lane and on the anthropological research of John Layard, were provided only years later by Auden’s friends, Isherwood and Spender. Moreover, its emphasis on groups has an important political significance which has often led to its being considered a quasi-Fascist work, not least by Auden himself.