The Thirties and After [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION I first conceived of this book as a collection of essays, some of them concerned with the political involvement of myself, as a member of the Thirties' generation, with public events, others of them critical essays and reviews of purely literary interest. I hoped that this would provide a kind of case history of a Thirties' poet in which the connection between different documents would illustrate themes of literature and politics over a period of nearly half a century. I thought that there should be background essays connecting the sections, each of which would correspond roughly to a decade. Later I recalled that over the years I had, spasmodically, kept journals, some of which had been published in periodicals. The journals record a continuous development throughout this whole period. They are often highly personal—in September Journal too much so—but they also tend to digress into essays. The introduction of passages from the journals would, I realized, give the book a more personal and cohesive character than that of a miscellaneous collection of essays, reports and reviews. I have tried to retain throughout the themes of the Thirties-going beyond them, but relating always to them. One theme is that my own Thirties' generation—which seems to be identified with Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice, Day-Lewis and myself as apart from that far more politically involved one represented by John Cornford—never became so politicized as to disagree seriously with an older generation of writers who held views often described as "reactionary," fascistic even, but whom we admired this side of idolatry: W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and—most of xiii