Through close analysis of the major poems written during the 1930s by W.H.Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, this study highlights the often creative quarrels in their work between a sense of poetry as autonomous art and an anti-modernist desire to communicate. This book does not allow the poetry to be subsumed within some impersonal historical Zeitgeist, instead it concentrates on the issue of poetic achievement, focusing an individual poems. Michael O'Neill is the author of The Human Mind's Imaginings and Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life and Gareth Reeves is the author of T.S.Eliot, A Virgilian Poet.