The Oxford Poets

The Oxford Poets

The poets, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice, are known as Oxford Poets. Michael Roberts (1902-48) for a while organised these poets, then, the leadership passed to W.H. Auden. These poets were entirely new men endowed with an entirely new outlook. Although these poets later on separated, they remain associated in the History of English Poetry as the four Musketeers of the Oxford Movement and the new country movement. These poets were Oxford graduates and had been great friends when they were undergraduates. The following are the common characteristics which give these poets the identity of Oxford group : (i) Their thematic content contained marks of innovation and experimental modernness. (ii) They had more intellectual and less emotional appeal. (iii) Their political involvement with communism was born of a sense of guilt and pity. (iv) These poets also show the influence of Freud. (v) Their common identity was reflected in their cynicism and satire. They came to feel as if they belonged to nowhere. A sense of the loss of moorings, of rootlessness, and a quest for a new base characterised the early poetry of the group and gave them a common identity. (vi) Their poetical technique was greatly influenced by Imagism, French symbolism and HopkinsEliot innovations. The poetry of the Oxford Group in intellectual and unemotional. The material of much contemporary poetry, writes A.C. Ward, is barren and boring to those brought up in an earlier tradition : a thin whimper displaced both the song of joy over the strong cry of agony.