The Angry Young Men of the Thirties

by Elton Edward Smith

From the new and interesting viewpoint of the milieu of the 1930s and the eras of English literary and political history which preceded and followed that decade, Elton Smith examines the special signifi­cance of the works of C. Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and W. H. Auden. In his view the 1930s were for the angry young men represented by these four poets a kind of bridge between the disillusionment following the French Revolution and the despair engendered by the Moscow-Berlin nonaggression pact at the end of the decade. What these four poets had in common, in addition to their poetic hopes for a new era, was a Socialist allegiance, two of them as party members, the other two intellectually or emotionally drawn to so­cialism as the cure for the malaise from which England suffered. As Smith bril­liantly shows, the poets’ socialistic pre­scriptions were ineffective because of their growing realization of the political expediency of the Communist Party, and their voices became muted.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1975