It was Spender's Poems, 1933, which first made the general public aware that there was a new poetic generation born, and we can tell this from the fact that the popular press, borrowing a word from one of his poems, attached to the group the soubriquet 'The Pylon Poets'…. [It] was important, and particularly important (and deleterious) to Spender himself. He could have handled easily enough, with his habit of laughing at himself, the more vulgar role of spokesman for the group in popular interviews and such like. But he now became the chief pawn in the battle between the full-scale idealogues and the poets….

Spender was politically far the most knowledgeable of the group. He was certainly naive, in an admirable sense, as the poems show: but politically he was comparatively sophisticated. He was the son of an important Liberal journalist, an Asquithian high-up, and so knew what...