New Collected Poems of Stephen Spender

by Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender, along with his friends W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and C. Day Lewis, rose to prominence in the 1930s, writing powerfully of the fear and paranoia of a continent heading towards war. By the time of his death in 1995 he had established a distinguished reputation as a poet, critic, editor and translator. This New Collected Poems , edited by Michael Brett, gathers seven decades of verse from Poems (1933) to Dolphins (1994) and the late uncollected work. Reordering the thematic principle of the 1985 Collected Poems , this edition returns to a book-by-book chronology and allows the reader to experience, for the first time, the full development and range of his career.

Genres: Poetry

416 pages, Paperback

First published May 6, 2004

About the author

Sir Stephen Harold Spender (1909–1995), English poet, translator, literary critic and editor, was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford, where he first became associated with such other outspoken British literary figures as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice. His book The Thirties and After (1979) recalls these figures and others prominent in the arts and politics and his Journals 1939–1983, published in 1986 and edited by John Goldsmith, are a detailed account of his times and contemporaries.

His passionate and lyrical verse, filled with images of the modern industrial world yet intensely personal, is collected in such volumes as Twenty Poems (1930), The Still Centre (1939), Poems of Dedication (1946), Collected Poems, 1928–1985 (1986).

World Within World, Stephen Spender's autobiography, contains vivid portraits of Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and many other prominent literary figures. First published in 1951 and still in print, World Within World is recognised as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to come out of the 1930s and 1940s. There can be few better portrayals of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s.

The Destructive Element (1935), The Creative Element (1953), The Making of a Poem (1962) and Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities (1974), about literary exchanges between Britain and the United States, contain literary and social criticism. Stephen Spender's other works include short stories, novels such as The Backward Son and the heavily autobiographical The Temple (set in Germany on the 1930s) and translations of the poetry of Lorca, Altolaguerra, Rilke, Hölderlin, Stefan George and Schiller. From 1939 to 1941 he co-edited Horizon magazine with Cyril Connolly and was editor of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1967.

Stephen Spender owed his own early recognition and publication as a poet to T. S. Eliot. In turn Spender was always a generous champion of young talent, from his raising a fund for the struggling 19-year-old Dylan Thomas, to a lifelong commitment to helping promote the publication of newcomers. In 1972, with his passionate concern for the rights of banned and silenced writers to free expression, he was the chief founder of Index on Censorship, in response to an appeal on behalf of victimised authors worldwide by the Russian dissident Litvinov.

Reviews

[Shawn Thrasher]

Stephen Spender's poetry is complicated.
Difficult and complex.
I undertook an arduous reading journey, and nearly gave up the ghost at one point, but picked up the book and kept at it.
Intricate, difficult, realistic, sometimes disturbing, unrelenting.
Often puzzling, knotting, thorny, perplexing.
Wheels within wheels.
Some of them sad.
None of them were easy.

[Eduardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

In graduate school I had a tutorial on W.H. Auden and in reading about his life I first heard of Stephen Spender & Louis MacNeice, now Spender is one of my favorite poets for various reasons, in part really by his autobiography World Within World which I re-read every year and also some of his poems which have a more naive lyrical feel than Auden, though I still enjoy Auden I do gravitate more to the poems of Spender and MacNeice (especially Autumn Journal) that was a very long way of saying this is a really great collection and one that shows Spender's development as a poet and writer. I do wish(as he alludes in his journals) that he would have focused more on poetry than on prose.

[Jean Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

How about this for idealism:

"I think continually of those who were truly great--
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their heart the fire's center…
born of the sun they traveled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honor."

I don't think we too much think of those "who were truly great" any longer.