Stephen Spender

For more information on Sir Stephen Harold Spender, visit Britannica.com.

Sir Stephen Harold Spender (1909-1995), poet, critic, translator, travel writer, and English man of letters, first came to prominence as a poet of social protest in the 1930s.

Stephen Spender was born February 28, 1909, the son of well-to-do, accomplished parents. His father, Edward Harold Spender, was himself a novelist and journalist. Stephen attended the University College School and then matriculated at University College, Oxford, where he became active in both literary and political circles, editing university poetry anthologies and debating current issues while forging his own poetic style.

Spender was of the first generation for whom World War I had ceased to be an important symbolic experience (as it had been for such writers as Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh). For him, rather, it was the economic and political dislocations which followed - labor unrest; rising unemployment, especially after 1929; the upsurge of Fascist-Nazi totalitarianism - which fired a lively imagination from the first, both poetic and critical. Although he had a long and creative career, continuing in productivity well after World War II, Spender will probably best be remembered as part of a twin spearhead of English social protest (with his friend W. H. Auden) of the 1930s. Other poets in this group included C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice.

The poetry of these young poets tended at first to be too precious, marred and obscured by an excessively private imagery, but Spender's deep sympathies with ordinary people enabled him to simplify his expression for a more direct communication in Poems (1933), the first significant collection of his work. Here, in "Without That Once Clear Aim," he lamented that "on men's buried lives there falls no light." The ideal affirmed was a democratic socialist one:

 No spirit seek here rest. But this: No man Shall hunger: Man shall spend equally. ("Not Palaces, An Era's Crown")

Spender praised the concept of a collective industrialism: the owner-worker, joyously contributing his labor as part of a meaningful community:

 They think how one life hums, revolves and toils, One cog in a golden singing hive. ("The Funeral," 1934) 

With the development of a growing, menacing fascism on the European continent during the 1930s Spender's industrial images, in protest, became enriched by the addition of those from modern warfare. (Spender spent considerable time in Germany during these years.) The dictator's ticking bomb explodes, silencing the heartbeat of a civilian child:

 The timed, exploding heart that breaks The loved and little hearts. ("The Bombed Happiness," 1939). 

For Spender, the most important political event during these years was the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Along with many of his generation, he saw this conflict as a dress rehearsal of the titanic conflict between democracy and totalitarianism which was to culminate almost immediately afterward in World War II. Partisanship for the Republican side in Spain, against the eventually triumphant General Franco, inspired Spender's poetry. Some of his best work from this time was collected as Poems for Spain (1939). Earlier, in the same vein of politically radical expression, are Vienna (1934), a long didactic poem, and Trial of a Judge (1937), a verse play. As a critic defending the imaginative writer's social role Spender made a significant prose statement in The Destructive Element (1934).

At the end of the 1930s, when the nature of Stalinist rule had become more evident - especially after the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939 - Spender became disillusioned with Russian Communism (this process having begun with a falling out at a writers' conference in Spain two years earlier). Especially eloquent testimony of this disenchantment with Communism can be found in Spender's essay in The God That Failed (1949).

During World War II Spender served as a fireman in the National Fire Service. An earlier marriage, to Frances Marie Inez in 1936, had been dissolved, and in 1941 he married again, to Natasha Litvin, with whom he had a son and daughter. After the war Spender worked for the United Nations, serving as counsellor for the Section on Letters of the U.N. Economic and Scientific Committee (UNESCO) in 1947.

Another aspect of this writer's contribution was his editorial work. He co-edited Horizon magazine from 1939 to 1941; later he held the same post with Encounter (1953-1967). As a latter day romantic and social critic, it was not surprising that Spender was drawn to sympathetic figures from the past: he edited a book of Shelley's verse (1971) and a volume of D. H. Lawrence's writings (1973). Two years later he paid homage to an old friend by editing W. H. Auden: A Tribute.

A particularly happy aspect of Spender's postwar life and work was the numerous positions held on the New World side of the Atlantic. He held the Elliston Chair of Poetry, University of Cincinnati (1953) and the Beckman Professorship, University of California (1959); he was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1965); he gave the Clark Lectures on Poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1966 and the Mellon Lectures in Washington, D.C. in 1968. Other teaching positions in the United States were at Cornell College, Vanderbilt, Connecticut, Loyola, and Northwestern. He was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In England, Spender was professor of English, University College, London University (1970-1977). He took this position after becoming interested in the student radicalism of the 1960s, which he analyzed in The Year of the Young Rebels (1969). Spender was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1971 and was knighted in 1982.

He was also a translator of note. Spender's rendition of Shiller's Mary Stuart appeared in 1958 and was produced at the Old Vic Theater three years later. He translated the entire Oedipus Trilogy in 1983, staged by the Oxford Playhouse that year. World Within World, his autobiography, appeared in 1951; Learning Laughter, a record of his travels in Israel, the next year. Throughout this entire postwar period Spender continued to write poetry, collections of this verse appearing from time to time: Poems of Dedication (1946); Collected Poems (1954); Selected Poems (1965); The Generous Days (1971); Collected Poems 1978-1985 (1985); and Dolphins (1994).

In 1993, Spender filed a plagiarism lawsuit regarding a novel which he asserted was taken from his own autobiography. The suit was settled in 1994. He died in London on July 17, 1995.

Further Reading

Other books by Spender included a reminiscence, The Thirties and After (1978); China Diary (1982), another travel piece (with David Hockney); an anthology of short fiction, Engaged in Writing (1958); and a collection of his journals 1939-1983 (published in 1986). D.E.S. Maxwell analyzed Spender's poetry in the context of his early contemporaries in Poets of the Thirties (1969). W.D. Jacobs wrote a shorter critical assessment, "The Moderate Poetical Success of Stephen Spender," in College English 17 (1956). The poet, Joseph Brodsky, wrote a lengthy commentary, English Lessons from Stephen Spender for the New Yorker (1996), in which he reminisced about his 23-year friendship with Spender.

Quotes:

"I think of those who were truly great. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's center."

Stephen Spender
Spender in 1933
Born	Stephen Harold Spender 28 February 1909(1909-02-28) Kensington, London, England
Died	16 July 1995 (aged 86) Westminster, London, England
Occupation	Poet, novelist, essayist
Nationality	United Kingdom
Alma mater	University College, Oxford
Spouse(s)	Natasha Litvin

Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work. He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Career 1.3 Personal life 2 Stephen Spender Memorial Trust 3 Bibliography 3.1 Poetry 3.2 Drama 3.3 Fiction 3.4 Criticism, travel books and essays 3.5 Memoir 3.6 Letters and journals 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

Biography

Early years

Spender was born Kensington, London, to journalist, Edward Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet.^[2] He went to Gresham's School, Holt and later Charlecote School in Worthing, but was unhappy there. On the death of his mother he was transferred to University College School (Hampstead), which he later described as "that gentlest of Schools."^[3] Spender subsequently went up to University College, Oxford where, in 1973, he was made an honorary fellow. He left Oxford without taking a degree and subsequently lived for periods of time in Germany. He said at various times throughout his life that he never passed an exam, ever. Perhaps his closest friend and the man who had the biggest influence on him was W. H. Auden. Around this time he was also friends with Christopher Isherwood (who had also lived in Weimar Germany), and fellow Macspaunday members Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. He was friendly with David Jones and later come to know W. B. Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre and T. S. Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf.

His early poetry, notably Poems (1933) was often inspired by social protest. His convictions found further expression in Vienna (1934), a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Viennese socialists, and in Trial of a Judge (1938), an anti-Fascist drama in verse. His autobiography, World within World (1951), is a re-creation of much of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s.

Career

Spender began work on a novel in 1929, which was not published until 1988, under the title The Temple. The novel is about a young man who travels to Germany and finds a culture at once more open than England—particularly about relationships between men—and showing frightening anticipations of Nazism, which are confusingly related to the very openness the main character admires. Spender says in his 1988 introduction:

In the late Twenties young English writers were more concerned with censorship than with politics.... 1929 was the last year of that strange Indian Summer—the Weimar Republic. For many of my friends and for myself, Germany seemed a paradise where there was no censorship and young Germans enjoyed extraordinary freedom in their lives....^[4]

When the Spanish civil war began, he went to Spain with the International Brigades (who were fighting against Francisco Franco's fascist forces) to report and observe for the Communist Party of Great Britain. Harry Pollitt, head of the CPGB, told Spender "to go and get killed; we need a Byron in the movement."^{[citation needed]}

His 1938 translations of works by Berthold Brecht and Miguel Hernández appeared in John Lehmann's New Writing.^[5]

A member of the political left wing during this early period, he was one of those who wrote of their disillusionment with communism in the essay collection The God that Failed (1949), along with Arthur Koestler and others. It is thought that one of the big areas of disappointment was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which many leftists saw as a betrayal. Like fellow poets W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and several other outspoken opponents of fascism in the 1930s, Spender did not see active military service in World War II. He was initially graded 'C' upon examination due to his earlier colitis, poor eyesight, varicose veins and the long term effects of a tapeworm in 1934. However, he contrived by pulling strings to be re-examined and was upgraded to 'B' which meant that he could serve in the London Auxiliary Fire Service. Spender spent the winter of 1940 teaching at Blundell's School.

He felt close to the Jewish people; his mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, was half Jewish (her father's family were German Jews who converted to Christianity, while her mother came from an upper-class family of Catholic German, Lutheran Danish and distantly Italian descent). Spender's second wife, Natasha, whom he married in 1941, was also Jewish.

After the war he was member of the Allied Control Commission, restoring civil authority in Germany.^[6]

With Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson Spender co-founded Horizon magazine and served as its editor from 1939 to 1941. He was editor of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1966, but resigned after it emerged that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which published the magazine, was being covertly funded by the CIA.^[7] Spender always insisted that he was unaware of the ultimate source of Encounter's funds. Spender taught at various American institutions, accepting the Elliston Chair of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati in 1954. In 1961 he became professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.

He helped found the magazine Index on Censorship, he was involved in the founding of the Poetry Book Society, and he did work for UNESCO.^[8]

Spender was Professor of English at University College, London, 1970-77, and then became Professor Emeritus.

Spender was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) at the 1962 Queen's Birthday Honours,^[9] and knighted in the 1983 Queen's Birthday Honours.^[10][11]

At a ceremony commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, D-day on June 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan quoted from Spender's poem "The Truly Great" in his remarks:

Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your "lives fought for life... and left the vivid air signed with your honor."

Personal life

Spender married Natasha Litvin, a concert pianist, in 1941. Their daughter Lizzie is married to the Australian actor/comedian Barry Humphries, and their son Matthew is married to the daughter of the Armenian artist Arshile Gorky.

Spender's sexuality has been the subject of debate. Spender's seemingly changing attitudes have caused him to be labeled bisexual, repressed, latently homophobic, or simply someone so complex as to resist easy labeling.^[12] Many of his friends in his earlier years were gay. Spender himself had many affairs with men in his earlier years, most notably with Tony Hyndman (who is called "Jimmy Younger" in his memoir World Within World). Following his affair with Muriel Gardiner he shifted his focus to heterosexuality,^[6] though his relationship with Hyndman complicated both this relationship and his short-lived marriage to Inez Maria Pearn (1936-39). His marriage to Natasha Litvin in 1941 seems to have marked the end of his romantic relationships with men. Subsequently, he toned down homosexual allusions in later editions of his poetry. The following line was revised in a republished edition:

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution.

It was later revised to read:

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution.

Spender sued author David Leavitt for allegedly using his relationship with "Jimmy Younger" in Leavitt's While England Sleeps in 1994. The case was settled out of court with Leavitt removing certain portions from his text.

Spender died from heart failure in Westminster, London, at 86.^[13]

Stephen Spender Memorial Trust

The Stephen Spender Memorial Trust was founded in 1997 to commemorate Spender's life and works and to encourage some of his principal interests: poetry, poetic translation, and freedom of creative expression. The Trust aims to widen knowledge of Spender and his circle, help contemporary writers reach an English language audience, and promote literary translation from modern and ancient languages into English. The Trust runs a programme of grants to support translators, as well as an annual translation competition, The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation.^[14]

Bibliography

Poetry Nine Experiments (1928, privately printed) Twenty Poems (1930) Poems (1933; 2nd edition 1934) Vienna (1934) The Still Centre (1939) Ruins and Visions (1942) Spiritual Exercises (1943, privately printed) Poems of Dedication (1947) The Edge of Being (1949) Collected Poems, 1928-1953 (1955) Selected Poems (1965) The Express (1966) The Generous Days (1971) Selected Poems (1974) Recent Poems (1978) Collected Poems 1928-1985 (1986) Dolphins (1994) New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Brett, (2004) Drama Trial of a Judge (1938) Rasputin's End (opera libretto, music by Nicolas Nabokov, 1958) The Oedipus Trilogy (1985) Fiction The Burning Cactus (1936, stories) The Backward Son (1940) Engaged in Writing (1958) The Temple (written 1928; published 1988)

Criticism, travel books and essays The Destructive Element (1935) Forward from Liberalism (1937) Life and the Poet (1942) European Witness (1946) Poetry Since 1939 (1946) The God That Failed (1949, with others, ex-Communists' testimonies) Learning Laughter (1952) The Creative Element (1953) The Making of a Poem (1955) The Struggle of the Modern (1963) The Year of the Young Rebels (1969) Love-Hate Relations (1974) Eliot (1975; Modern Masters series) W. H. Auden: A Tribute (edited by Spender, 1975) The Thirties and After (1978) China Diary (with David Hockney, 1982) Love-Hate Relations (1974) The Thirties and After (1978) Memoir World Within World (1951) Letters and journals Letters to Christopher: Stephen Spender's Letters to Christopher Isherwood (1980) Journals, 1939-1983 (1985)

See also

• List of Gresham Professors of Rhetoric
• Mary Spender (singer/songwriter) is a distant cousin to Stephen Spender.

References

1. ^ "Poet Laureate Timeline: 1961-1970". Library of Congress. 2008. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate-1961-1970.html. Retrieved 2008-12-19. 
2. ^ Births England and Wales 1837-1915
3. ^ Sutherland, John (2005). Stephen Spender: A Literary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195178165. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hOArXgCOZqgC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=stephen+spender+worthing&source=web&ots=MQGGCW0ZNF&sig=7qjM6SMcCafheshij9-nQ0B2_hI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPP1,M1. 
4. ^ Bozorth, Richard R. (1995). "But Who Would Get It? Auden and the Codes of Poetry and Desire". ELH 62 (3): 709–727. doi:10.1353/elh.1995.0023. 
5. ^ New Writing at Google Books Accessed March 21, 2009
6. ^ ^{a b} Sutherland, John (September 2004). "Spender, Sir Stephen Harold (1909–1995)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/57986. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/57986. Retrieved 2008-12-21. 
7. ^ Frances Stonor Saunders (12 July 1999). "How the CIA plotted against us". New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.com/199907120022. Retrieved 2008-12-21. 
8. ^ Warwick McFadyen, review of John Sutherland's biography "Stephen Spender", The Age, Review, p.3
9. ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 42683, pp. 4316–4317, 25 May 1962. Retrieved on 2008-07-15.
10. ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 49375, pp. 1–2, 10 June 1983. Retrieved on 2008-07-15.
11. ^ London Gazette: no. 49575, p. 16802, 20 December 1983. Retrieved on 2008-07-15.
12. ^ G. Patton Wright (20 December 2004). "Spender, Sir Stephen". glbtq.com. http://www.glbtq.com/literature/spender_s.html. Retrieved 2008-12-21. 
13. ^ Deaths England and Wales 1984-2006
14. ^ Stephen Spender Memorial Trust

Further reading

• Hynes, Samuel, The Auden Generation (1976)
• Sutherland, John, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (2004); US edition: Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (2005)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Stephen Spender

• Ernest Hilbert reviews the reissue of Stephen Spender's autobiography World Within World
• Stephen Spender Memorial Trust
• NY Review of books bibliography
• "Spender's Lives" - Ian Hamilton, The New Yorker
• "Stephen Spender, Toady: Was there any substance to his politics and art?" – Stephen Metcalf, Slate.com, February 7, 2005

v • d • e Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Joseph Auslander (1937) · Allen Tate (1943) · Robert Penn Warren (1944) · Louise Bogan (1945) · Karl Shapiro (1946) · Robert Lowell (1947) · Léonie Adams (1948) · Elizabeth Bishop (1949) · Conrad Aiken (1950) · William Carlos Williams (1952) · Randall Jarrell (1956) · Robert Frost (1958) · Richard Eberhart (1959) · Louis Untermeyer (1961) · Howard Nemerov (1963) · Reed Whittemore (1964) · Stephen Spender (1965) · James Dickey (1966) · William Jay Smith (1968) · William Stafford (1970) · Josephine Jacobsen (1971) · Daniel Hoffman (1973) · Stanley Kunitz (1974) · Robert Hayden (1976) · William Meredith (1978) · Maxine Kumin (1981) · Anthony Hecht (1982) · Reed Whittemore (1984) · Robert Fitzgerald (1984) · Gwendolyn Brooks (1985) · Robert Penn Warren (1986) · Richard Wilbur (1987) · Howard Nemerov (1988) · Mark Strand (1990) · Joseph Brodsky (1991) · Mona Van Duyn (1992) · Rita Dove (1993) · Robert Hass (1995) · Robert Pinsky (1997) · Rita Dove / Louise Glück / W. S. Merwin (1999) · Stanley Kunitz (2000) · Billy Collins (2001) · Louise Glück (2003) · Ted Kooser (2004) · Donald Hall (2006) · Charles Simic (2007) · Kay Ryan (2008)  · Kay Ryan (2009)

Persondata
NAME	CBE, Sir Stephen Harold Spender
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Spender, Stephen Harold
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Poet
DATE OF BIRTH	28 February 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH	16 July 1995
PLACE OF DEATH

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