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The group represented the rising generation of that time. They were headily influenced by the social climate of the 1930's with the members born shortly before the War, addressing social, political and economic concerns of the time. Auden himself described the thirties as "the age of anxiety".
Many used everyday events, ordinary to the reader of their poems to reflect these themes.
Another influence is travel and the wider world. MacNeice and Auden visited Iceland in 1936, while both spent time in America separately.
'The principal concern for the ploughman, for instance, is ploughing and sowing; he might “have
heard the splash”(16) of Icarus’ fall but “for him it was not an important failure; the
sun shone” ' (17).
(Melanie Konzett BA English Literature with History, London, 2006)
Auden's poem Musee des Beaux Arts.
Explains much of the Auden Group poetry which dealt with the consequences of War and how it did not always directly affect the everyday citizen.
The members of the Auden group were often termed as 'social poets', with the group being a collection of vaguely left-leaning poets, who ranged on the political spectrum such as MacNeice who was a political skeptic and Spender who was a communist. They often revealed their political feelings through their poems, more in some than others.
However the whole group was never actually gathered in the same room at the same time, instead pairs of poets collaborating on separate works, such as Auden and MacNeice with Letters from Iceland a travel book and MacNeice's Modern Poetry, as well as Auden and Isherwood on a number of plays.
The Auden Group or Auden Generation was the influential group of British and Irish poets and writers active in the 1930's hence their other name of the 'thirties poets'.
Although the group loosely described the many poets of thirties, it did include Louis MacNeice, W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. All of the poets knew each other from studying at either Oxford or Cambridge. They all also shared vague left wing tendencies