[1] Although many newspaper articles and a few books appeared about the "Auden Group", the existence of the group was essentially a journalistic myth, a convenient label for poets and novelists who were approximately the same age, who had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge, who had known each other at different times and had more or less left-wing views ranging from MacNeice's political scepticism to Upward's committed communism.
The "group" was never together in the same room: the four poets (Auden, Day-Lewis, MacNeice and Spender) were in the same room only once in the 1930s, for a BBC broadcast in 1938 of modern poets (also including Dylan Thomas and others who were not associated with the "Auden Group").
The event was so insignificant that Day-Lewis failed to mention it when he wrote in his autobiography, The Buried Day, that the four were first together in 1953.
As undergraduates, Auden and Day-Lewis wrote a brief introduction to the annual Oxford Poetry.
"MacSpaunday" was a name invented by Roy Campbell,[2] in his Talking Bronco (1946), to designate a composite figure made up of the four poets: Campbell, in common with much literary journalism of the period, imagined that the four were a group of like-minded poets although they shared little but left-wing views in the broadest sense of the word.