Hugh MacDiarmid: Lenin and the British Literary Left in the 1930s

Abstract

It is clear that the 1930s, however stigmatised for subsequent readers as a ‘low dishonest decade’ represented a major period of distinctive creativity in twentieth-century British writing, producing poetry and prose (and drama and film) of great power and innovativeness. Many of the major Modernist writers of the 1920s were still active throughout the subsequent decade, including T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. At the same time, the period which also saw the emergence of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice as poets, of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Graham Greene as novelists, of F. R. Leavis and Christopher Caudwell as critics, alongside the less individualised development of experimental theatre groups and the growth of an indigenous British cinema, is one which surely demands our attention and commentary. And indeed, there now exists a great wealth of scholarly and argumentative books and articles on various literary aspects of the period, the great majority of which still interpret events largely through what I will argue is the limiting and over-prescriptive perspective of ‘the Auden generation’.