Although it has been almost fifty years since it first appeared, Auden's The Orators is still a much appreciated but little understood work. The four alternately addled and sinister speakers of Book I, the introspective and doomed Airman of Book II, and the six occasional and parodic odes of Book III have each, to some extent, been separately glossed. But so far, no one has found the pattern in the carpet that shows how they all fit together. What Monroe K. Spears wrote of The Orators in his major study, The Poetry of W. H. Auden, still holds true today: One constantly feels on the verge of discovering the key that will make the whole thing clear. Since thirty years have failed to reveal anything of the sort, one must conclude that this feeling is illusory.' Spears's admission, as well as those of subsequent critics, is really a commentary on the limitations of purely textual criticism. When detached from its peculiar place in literary history, The Orators never has and never will make sense. When seen, however, in the context of what writers and especially poets were concerned with in 1932, it falls into a splendid, simple pattern. The Orators is Auden's literary manifesto of the thirties, and it was to govern his verse for the rest of that tempestuous decade. There can be little doubt but that in The Orators Auden was primarily addressing the new generation of writers that had just emerged as a self-conscious group. The main dedication to Stephen Spender is followed by further dedications in the odes of Book III to