Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the Thirties were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism, by the class-struggle and a passionate belief in poets as people whose actions are as publically important as their poems.For them, the Spanish Civil War epitomized the mood of the times, as their symbolic obsessions were transmuted into tragic reality. But from within their strongly defined unity of ideals, an astonishingly varied body of poetry emerged.

Robin Skelton has arranged the poetry to make an illuminating 'critical essay' of the period, and in his introduction he brilliantly probes the moods and mores of an intensely troubled and creative decade.