It's about Auden, Spender, Isherwood, etc. -- the intellectuals who were too young to have served in World War I, who felt the strain of having missed a defining experience, and by the late 1920s they were already defining themselves in terms of the coming war. There was a powerful feeling that WWI had proved liberal democracy a failure, and a strong pressure to turn either Communist or Fascist. It's the "low dishonest decade" that Auden came to repudiate, and a powerful cautionary tale to those who feel a demand to politicize art.
As EM Forster said at the time, and this should be required reading for the Bush administration:
And as Johnny Cash said a couple of generations later,
"Don't go mixing politics with the folk songs of our land."
As EM Forster said at the time, and this should be required reading for the Bush administration:
As for their argument for revolution – the argument that we must do evil now so that good may come in the long run – it seems to me to have nothing in it. Not because I am too nice to do evil, but because I don’t believe that the Communists know what leads to what. They say they know because they are becoming conscious of the ‘causality of society.’ I say they don’t know, and my counsel for 1938-39 is rather: Do good, and possibly good may come of it. Be soft even if you stand to get squashed. Beware of the long run. Seek understanding dispassionately, and not in accordance with a theory."
And as Johnny Cash said a couple of generations later,
"Don't go mixing politics with the folk songs of our land."
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