Volume 25, Number 21 & 22 · January 25, 1979
A Poet in Politics
By John Bayley
The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People 1933-1970
by Stephen Spender
Random House, 236 pp., $10.00
Terrorism and Trade Unionism, the most obvious forces at work in the politics of the free countries of Europe today, have almost nothing to offer to the literary imagination. This is in part because they are parodies or degenerate mutants of old-fashioned capitalism and its robber barons, exercising by force and fraud a degraded form of private enterprise at the expense of liberal institutions. Neither offers any real idea of an alternative society in the romantic sense in which anarchism and socialism once did. This fact alone makes the political climate of the Thirties, as it appeared to poets and intellectuals, seem infinitely far away, a fairy tale age of 'new styles of architecture, a change of heart,' an age in which it was possible, even on the verge of a frightful abyss, to believe in human nature being born again.
Review, 3033 words
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