The 1930s was a decade characterized both by intense anxiety and by a highly charged idealism, and much of the poetry of the period owes its energies to the fruitful conjunction of the two. This book examines the work of nine significant poets of the 1930s: W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis, Geoffrey Grigson, Kenneth Allot, Bernard Spencer, David Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas. The emphasis is on close textual analysis, leading to a fuller understanding of the individual talents of the poets under review; but attention is paid, too, to the wider social context of which these writers tended to be so acutely aware, and to those shared preoccupations which underlie their individual achievements. This book should be of particular interest to those studying the literature of the 1930s at sixth-form college or university level, but it is also aimed at anyone seeking a broader understanding of this fascinating period of literary history.