In English poetry the 1930s have been seen as the political decade, with middle-class, left-wing poets such as Day Lewis, Spender and Auden celebrating the onward march of technology and taking up themes of socialist commitment including, in the later 1930s, the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Such attempts to bring politics directly into poetry were not without their critics, especially in relation to the seemingly willed nature of much of the celebratory material, and the outsider status of the middleclass poet attempting to enter into the lives of the deprived classes. Poetry as a genre does not lend itself easily to such unambivalent ‘messaging’, and in his What is Literature?, written in the aftermath of World War Two, Jean Paul Sartre went so far as to argue that by the very nature of his medium ‘the poet is forbidden to commit himself’.

As discussed in previous chapters, the principal male Scottish modernist writers came themselves from a lower-class background (if not actually ‘deprived’ in the sense applicable to many urban working-class families in the 1930s). In addition, the literary revival movement from its beginnings was able to contain within it a modern – and modernist – concern with the remaking of artistic forms, together with an ideological concern to renew the life of the nation socially, economically and politically; and in the outstanding creative writing of the time these two aims on the whole managed to cohabit without inhibiting artistic autonomy.