Auden Group

Overview

Although many newspaper articles and a few books appeared about the "Auden Group", the existence of the group was essentially a journalistic myth, a convenient label for poets and novelists who were approximately the same age, who had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge, who had known each other at different times and had more or less left-wing views ranging from MacNeice's political scepticism to Upward's committed communism.

The "group" was never together in the same room: the four poets (Auden, Day-Lewis, MacNeice and Spender) were in the same room only once in the 1930s, for a BBC broadcast in 1938 of modern poets (also including Dylan Thomas and others who were not associated with the "Auden Group"). The event was so insignificant that Day-Lewis failed to mention it when he wrote in his autobiography, The Buried Day, that the four were first together in 1953.

The connections between individual writers as friends and collaborators were, however, real. Auden and Isherwood produced three plays and a travel book. Auden and MacNeice collaborated on a travel book. As undergraduates, Auden and Day-Lewis wrote a brief introduction to the annual Oxford Poetry. Auden dedicated books to Isherwood and Spender. Day-Lewis mentioned Auden in a poem, but the whole group never operated as such.