ABSTRACT
About the House is the first of the W. H. Auden books to fall within the period of this essay, and it had three serious successors, City Without Walls, Fog: Academic Graffiti can be bracketed off as the entertainer indulging himself with games that could be properly characterised as cosy, unashamedly minor, and often not very successful even on their own terms. Louis MacNeice died in 1963. The last survivor was Stephen Spender who died in 1995. His Collected Poems 1928-85 was highly selective. C. Day Lewis, who died in 1972 after a long illness, was probably as prolific a writer as MacNeice, and his reputation went through as many fluctuations. Many of the poems in them have a sense of being 'occasional' pieces, celebrating dead friends and dead artists, rediscovering places and roots in his native Ireland. The conventional judgement on Spender's work is that his early poems, in his first two books, are his best.
