Literary and artistic movements are fond of issuing manifestos. There are several texts with a claim to set out the beliefs of the left-leaning "Thirties Poets", a group whose legacy is still debated - most recently in tributes to their close collaborator, the writer Edward Upward, who died two weeks ago at the age of 105. However, A Hope for Poetry, Cecil Day Lewis's slim but passionate statement of their shared aims, is the most enduring.
A Hope for Poetry, published three-quarters of a century ago, had an extraordinary impact. Day Lewis's assertion that poets (and, in particular, himself and his colleagues WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice) had a prominent role to play in articulating the pressing challenges of economic recession and rising unemployment ran to six editions in the years up to the second world war, three more before 1945 and was still being reprinted in the mid-1970s. A few months after it came out, the Evening Standard reported on a meeting between TE Lawrence and Winston Churchill. They were bemoaning the state of Britain when Lawrence remarked that he had been reading a book by "the one great man in these lands - his name is Cecil Day Lewis".
Today it seems extraordinary that so much hope could be invested in poetry. Soon a new poet laureate will be named, but, despite Britain finding itself in an economic mess with clear parallels to the 1930s, no one is suggesting that the successful candidate will line up alongside politicians meaningfully to address the recession.
To the modern reader, there is a lost idealism - and a naivety - running through A Hope for Poetry. For all their claim to be speaking for the common man, the Thirties Poets, along with the prose writers Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward who made up their circle, were Oxbridge-educated and middle class. Most were eking out their literary earnings by teaching in private schools. As revolutionary figures, their lives hardly matched their rhetoric - as MI5 discovered. Alerted by the attention the poets were generating with their radical talk, its agents were sent to spy on Auden, Day Lewis and Spender as subversives. The best "proof" that the agent who followed Day Lewis could come up with, however, was that he "seldom wears a hat and [is] not altogether smart in dress".
Others pointed out publicly the irony of the poets' status as would-be revolutionaries. Julian Bell, son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, later killed fighting on the republican side in the Spanish civil war, had been an early associate of the "Auden gang", but subsequently condemned its political posturing as that of "enthusiastic boy scouts".
A Hope for Poetry is in this regard not without self-knowledge. In a section defending the role of the poet in conveying the suffering caused by the slump, Day Lewis writes: "This kind of poetry . . . is animated by unsentimental pity and sacred indignation. It does not wish to make poetic capital out of the suffering of others." He then quotes a Spender poem about the unemployed:
No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament
To make them birds upon my
This, he claims, "probably gets as near to communist poetry as bourgeois writers under a bourgeois regime can hope to get".
Yet it is a rare moment of restraint. The fighting talk that characterises the book is all about rejecting "the vague cri-de-coeur for a new world" in favour of "poems which show that the writer has emotionally experienced a political situation and assimilated it through his specific function into the substance of poetry". The core of the argument is that the poets it seeks to promote are more than willing to dirty their own hands in turbulent times by abandoning "pure" poetry in favour of verse that may be "impure", and may even border on propaganda, but which connects, on a human level, with what is going on in the country.
At the centre of the group was the didactic, compelling Wystan Auden. "I willingly became his disciple where poetry was concerned," Day Lewis later wrote of their early meetings in Auden's rooms in Christ Church, Oxford. Auden had much the same effect on Spender and MacNeice. Nevill Coghill, his tutor, would recall how Auden's sayings "would appear in the essays of other pupils. These being cross-examined and their nonsense laid bare, [they] still held the trump: 'Well, that's what Wystan says'." It was Auden, too, who provided the link between the young Oxford poets and their contemporaries Isherwood and Upward, who had been collaborating on writing their "Mortmere" stories at Cambridge. Auden was fond of reading out these macabre tales to his admirers.
The notion of them all as a single movement, however, is an exaggeration. History may lump their names together - most memorably as "MacSpaunday", the beast dreamt up by an embittered rival, the South African poet Roy Campbell - but the first time Auden, Day Lewis and Spender were all captured in a single photograph was in Venice in 1949. And MacNeice nearly didn't make it into A Hope for Poetry because, until then, he hadn't met Day Lewis.
A Hope for Poetry is noticeably short on concrete proposals. By the time of its publication, MacNeice had already rejected communism in his 1933 poem "To a Communist". Auden was still flirting with it. His opening remark from The Orators (1932) is quoted with approval in the manifesto: "What do you think about England, this country of ours where nobody is well?" One of the poems in The Orators was dedicated to Upward, who became a member of the party in 1932.
Day Lewis joined in 1936, as did Spender, and spoke at its rallies in industrial towns. While Spender tired of it quickly - and was disillusioned when he joined the trail of leftwing writers going to Spain to support the republicans in the civil war - Day Lewis stayed in longer, earning himself the label "Red Cecil". Within the wider group, Upward stayed longest. He resigned only in 1948, and then because he believed the party to be insufficiently revolutionary.
It wasn't only political and social concerns that brought the four MacSpaunday poets together, however. They shared much as writers. Again the dominant influence was Auden with his often savage satire, his habit of almost telegraphing his message, using the poetic equivalent of shorthand, and, above all, his liking for modern industrial imagery. The poems of all four from this period are full of trains, factories, mines, iron, steel and - in a memorable image from Spender - pylons. Day Lewis argues in A Hope for Poetry that there is "a social energy working through contemporary imagery so integrated with the poem as to release into it the external life they represent".
There was in these poets at this time a touch of the pulpit, of evangelising for a better world. Three of them - Auden, Day Lewis and MacNeice - were sons or grandsons of clergymen. All had rejected conventional religion as undergraduates, but retained its impetus towards activism in the cause of social justice. In exploring this in verse, they had to navigate modernism, and their relationship to it was a complicated one. They resisted its urge to break poetic form in order to discover new meaning. Such an undertaking can, A Hope for Poetry warns, make modernist verse difficult, if not unintelligible, especially to a working-class readership.
They also questioned what they saw as modernism's tendency, even when identifying political, social and economic issues, to do so as an observer rather than as an active participant for change. "We obscurely felt the need," Day Lewis wrote later of this period, "to do more with the fragments than shoring them against our ruin." Yet all admired The Waste Land, which had reignited enthusiasm for poetry in the post-war period. And three of the four Thirties Poets were published by Eliot at Faber.
What is most striking today is the furore that surrounded A Hope for Poetry. The poets were discussed on both the literary and political pages of newspapers and magazines. They were showered with invitations and plaudits. And, inevitably, it turned their heads: any doubts about the synthesis of poetry and politics were buried.
Yet it is now tempting to see the book less as an opening salvo than as a kind of swansong for a group whose moment was passing. The political climate that had made communism seem a plausible alternative for a polarised Britain changed as reports of Stalin's brutality began to leak out of the Soviet Union. Auden was starting out on the path that led him back to Christianity and to the remark, in his 1940 elegy for WB Yeats, that "poetry makes nothing happen". Later he was to suppress, or rewrite, some of his poems from that "low, dishonest decade" and played down suggestions that he had ever been part of a movement.
For the author of A Hope for Poetry disillusion was longer coming. In 1936, Day Lewis wrote a verse play, Noah and the Waters, which contained, whole and undigested, parts of The Communist Manifesto. It was panned by the critics, and a struggle ensued. On the one hand was a belief among the 30s writers - set out most forcefully by Upward in his 1937 essay "Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature" - that art and politics must be as one and that the only decent writing would come from the left. Day Lewis had great sympathy with such a view, as Noah and the Waters had shown. On the other hand, those close to Day Lewis - including Virginia Woolf - counselled him that communist propaganda and oratory were damaging his poetry. If he continued along that course, he risked being eclipsed - which was Upward's fate, as a result of his determination, long after the rest of that 30s generation had fallen by the wayside, to produce prose that was true to his political principles. Upward's 1938 novel, Journey to the Border, "dulled him into silence", as Valentine Cunningham has put it, and it was to be many more decades before he appeared in print again.
Day Lewis, by contrast, chose literature over politics and, in 1938, withdrew from the fray to rural Devon. It was, most critics agree, the making of him as a poet. His next collection, 1943's Word Over All, devoid of overt politics and full of the frailties of the human heart as he embarked on a love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, is widely regarded as his best.
Does A Hope for Poetry, 75 years on, still have a relevance? One admirer, the Irish poet and Oxford don Bernard O'Donoghue, believes it does. "It is a matter," he says, "of seeing where hope lay, and for that matter where it lies for writers today. This sounds sentimental; but it represents something quite specific and indispensable in poetic discussion. What I mean by hope, in the context of Day Lewis's book, is the view that poetry has something distinctive to offer to humanity... common endeavour, and is not, in Yeats's tempting phrase, merely 'self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting'."
But the last word rightly belongs to A Hope for Poetry itself. In a postscript added to the 1936 edition, Day Lewis wrote: "To the idea of poetry as exclusive, esoteric, amoral, the private affair of the poet, moving in a different world from prose, creative of its own reality, I should oppose the idea of poetry as catholic, diverse in function, moral, everyone's business (potentially at any rate), assimilating not rejecting prose meaning, a way of synthesising and communicating reality."