Two Young Englishmen

Abstract

In the summer of 1928, Wystan Hugh Auden, aged 21, left Oxford with a third-class degree in English literature, a considerable quantity of poems, and a nearly finished play, Paid on Both Sides. His Oxford had been, among other things, the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh (four years older than he), Harold Acton (three years), Henry Yorke, who became the novelist Henry Green (two years), Brian Howard, later a friend of both Auden and Isherwood (two years), and John Betjeman, who entered the university in the same term as Auden himself. The young men of this generation had been school— boys during the Great War, in which the fathers of many of them had fought and, not infrequently, died.