The 1930.s in poetry as in the novel are a decade easier to characterize. It is more completely dominated by a single group than any of the previous period. when people talk about the younger poets they mean W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender sometimes obscured because of the excessive concentration of thought and emotions. And no wonder, Spender along with W.H. Auden created the best poetry out of the contemplation of the various mechanical devices of civilization. The Express is the best work of its kind from its social and industrial preoccupation. spender has now become poet of inner life. His best work has simplicity and dignity and these works establish his potentiality and capabilities of an unmistakable freshness of both language and vision.
In Spender’s poems one can see the same political attitude that Auden and Day Lewis showed in their poems. Significantly, Spender in his poems insisted that the value of life lays as much in body as in the fiery soul. His poetry is characterized by the enrichment of sensuous imagery. He could invest pylon with physical appearance. Spender published less poetry than W.H. Auden and Day Lewis. In 1934, his important poem Vienna dealt with the clash between the dying civilization of the bourgeois and the new life of the workers unhappily crushed in this instance by the political rulers of Austria. He notably succeeded in portraying the death will and he vividly depicted the hunt of fugitive but as a whole the poem suffered from its ambitious symbolic method. The chorus in this play, The trail of a judge which showed the dilemma of the just judge between the mile stones of right and left hand not the poetic qualities of the choruses which we find in Auden’s plays. Spender’s memorable poetic volume of this decade was The still center of 1939 but its consists were various.
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One group of poems was concerned with the Spanish war. In this poem one can feel the same expression of pity that one finds in the poem of Wilfred Owen. The pity seems almost an element of spender’s sensuousness . His poem Portbou is a fine example of his descriptive power. what is more, his poems Marginal field and Elementary School , Classroom in a slum have similar qualities of Portbou. These poems reveal a search for a new attitude to life and poetry and lead to his prose expression, “that the poet is he who realizes in his art, in his own being of other lives and nature outside himself. His poems on the Spanish civil war had already shown him going deeper than partisanship.
Among the new groups of poets between 1930 and 1940, Stephen Spender won his spur by his critical and realistic attitude to life and no wonder with the perfection of W.H. Auden and Day Lewis and Spender exhibited his poetic talent and mirrored the horror and boredom of life.
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