Sir Stephen Spender, is an English poet and critic who was born in 1909. He was a member of the generation of British poets who came to prominence in the 1930s, a group sometimes referred to as the Oxford Poets.
It was a group that included W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. These poets rejected the esotericism of T S Eliot who was the most influential poet of the early 20th century.
They believed that writers should address the urgent political issues of the day, and that they should write with clarity while preserving a high standard of craftsmanship.
Spender’s early work was influenced by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Frederico Garcia Lorca. His poems expressed a self-critical, compassionate personality, and a compelling unity of thought and expression.
His poetry had a dreamy, fluid quality to it that he brought into his prose writing as well. He was always a poet first, but from the 1940’s onward, he came to be known for his perceptive criticism and his autobiographical writing.
He was in many ways a more personal poet than his early associates, and as the years went on, he became increasingly more autobiographical, turning his gaze from the external, current, and topical to the internal, more subjective experience.
Spender was a member of the National Fire Service for four years during the second world war. After the war he made several visits to the United States, teaching and lecturing at universities, and in 1965 he became the first non-American to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a position he held for one year.
Spender published a few important books during the 1980’s, a collection of journals dating from 1939 to 1983, a collection of letters that he wrote to Christopher Isherwood in the 1930’s, and a collection of poems.
One of Spender’s earliest works of autobiography, World within World, published in 1951, created a stir because of his frank disclosure of a queer relationship that he’d had at around the time of the Spanish Civil War. This book became the subject of a controversy when American writer David Leavitt published While England Sleeps in 1993.
Several details in the portrayal of a character’s affair in this book mirror experiences that Spender had shared in his autobiography. He accused Leavitt of plagiarism and filed a lawsuit to stop the publication of the book.
Leavitt and his publisher agreed to a settlement that would withdraw the book from publication until he made changes for a revised edition. During this period of intense attention focused on World within World, St. Martin’s reprinted the autobiography with a new introduction by Stephen Spender, which gave many readers the opportunity to discover or rediscover his work.
Stephen Spender has many wonderful, insightful poems to his credit, but my personal favourite is The Truly Great. I cannot quote it here in full for copyright reasons, so here are my favourite lines from the second stanza.
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You can find the poem in its entirety here.
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Sources:
poetryfoundation.org
Encyclopaedia Britannica
between the pages 