Chapter 1 - Poetry

Summary

For most twenty-first-century readers, the starting place for studying the poetry of the 1930s is Robin Skelton’s much-reprinted 1964 anthology Poetry of the Thirties. More influential even than Samuel Hynes’s book The Auden Generation (1976), it established the 1930s English canon as the poems of upper-middle-class educated men born between 1902 and 1916, a generation cut off from traditional certainties by the Great War in which they were too young to fight. Consciously departing from the patriotism and rural imagery of Georgian poetry, these men admired T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) but refused the modernist decentring of the post-Romantic subjective ‘I’.