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British poet Stephen Spender (1909-95), through his life spanning the 20th century, befriended, collected or was otherwise connected to a pantheon of artists such as Arp, Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Giacometti, Gorky, Guston, Hockney, Moore, Morandi, Picasso and others. Including examples of their work as well Spender's poems chosen by Auerbach, this publication is addressed to what Spender termed the "shared subject matter" of art and literature. Interweaving poetry, essay, artwork and generous archival photographs, The Worlds of Stephen Spender: I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great takes for its inspiration themes that preoccupied Spender and which have taken on a renewed urgency: art's movement across borders; collaboration between artists and writers; solidarity against their censorship; and the moral responsibility of the creative individual in times of social crisis.
Presents the British poet's autobiography, including portraits of friends Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, and Christopher Isherwood.
One of the leading poets and cultural icons of the 20th century, Stephen Spender was a prominent writer, literary critic, and social commentator--and close friend of some of the best-know creative talents of his day. Now, in this penetrating biography, John Sutherland paints a vivid portrait of Spender and of the glittering literary world of which he was a part, drawing on exclusive access to Spender's private papers. This briskly paced, compelling narrative illuminates the vast range of Spender's literary, political, and artistic interests. We follow Spender from childhood to his days at Oxford (where he first became friends with W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Isaiah Berlin); to his meteoric rise as poet in the 1930s, while still in his twenties; to his later years as cultural statesman, at home in both Britain and America. We witness many of the century's defining moments through Spender's eyes: the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Cold War, the 1960s sexual revolution, and the rise of America as a cultural force. And along the way, we are introduced to many of Spender's accomplished friends, including Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Cecil Day-Lewis, Joseph Brodsky, Lucian Freud, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. Perhaps most important, Sutherland has been granted exclusive access to Spender's private papers by his wife Natasha Spender. Thus he is able to provide a far more intimate look at the poet's personal life than has appeared in previous biographies. Featuring 36 unpublished photographs, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life throws light not only on this supremely gifted writer, but also on the literary and social history of the twentieth century.
Shelley said, in his Defence of Poetry, that poetry should be both centre and circumference of knowledge. In his new book, Spender takes Shelley's claim and relates it to modern literature. He points out that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, writers have been conscious of there being a problem of creating literature in the industrial era. All the discussions of tradition, symbolism, myth and the rest are part of a conscious strategy of writers to come to terms with a modern world which they feel presents quite special problems for them. Spender shows how Matthew Arnold's idea that criticism might be more important than poetry in our time, was taken over by poets who wrote criticism, and how in tern they have become superseded by critics who write poetry. The critical intelligence tens to absorb creative energy. He discusses the difference between the creative and critical functions and things that the present tendency of criticism to supersede creativity, and for poetry to become an academic exercise conducted by poets who are dons, is having a stifling effect on poetry. He thinks that there is an increasing tendency for the most creative activity of literature to become shut off from life and fermented, and that literature should be related much more to contemporary history, and less to dogmatic principles of academic criticism. This is a book in which the writer tried to reassert the relationship of literature to modern life. He believes that this relationship was the pre-occupation of writers in the 1920s and 1930, but that since then literature has become increasingly split into the writing of the new academics and that of aggressive anti-intellectuals. He things that contemporary criticism should be on a much wider basis, and take into account the history and the society in which we live, as well as the abstract principles which recent critics have evolved. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.
"Beyond the wonderful insights ... there is a portrait of the world in the eye of the storm between two world wars. It is a novel of awakening -- awakening to sex, yes ... but also an awakening to the presence of evil in the world and to the possibilities of love and friendship." -- The Bloomsbury Review
A son's personal exploration of one of the most influential—and troubled—artistic couples of the twentieth century Stephen Spender's life, with all its secrets, successes, and contradictions, is a vivid prism through which to view the twentieth century. He befriended Auden and Isherwood while at Oxford, and together the three had wildly transgressive adventures in Europe and were early vocal critics of Hitler and the rise of fascism in their celebrated writings. Like his friends, Spender was drawn to other men, yet he eventually married Natasha, a world-renowned concert pianist, and started a family. In the midst of a heady world of poetry and liberal politics, gay love affairs and tense silences, Matthew Spender grew up the child of two brilliant artists. Taught how to use adjectives by Uncle Auden and raised among the British cultural elite, Matthew led what might have been a charmed existence were it not for the tensions in his own household. His father, always susceptible to the allure of young men, was unable to stop himself, or reveal his secret, for the sake of his family; and his mother's suffering led her to infatuations of her own. Stephen Spender: In Search of My Father is a son's attempt to reconstruct a portrait of his magnetic father and unconventional family out of the ambiguous experiences of his childhood. Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries, family keepsakes and youthful memories, Matthew Spender tells the story of a singular family in the midst of its own cold war, as the artistic world of mid-century London circled around them.
The first critical biography of one of the twentieth century's towering literary figures. Stephen Spender was a minor poet, but a major cultural influence during much of the century. Literary critic, journalist, art critic, social commentator, and friendend of the best-known cultural figures of the modernist and postmodernist periods (Yeats, Woolf, Sartre, Auden, Eliot, Isherwood, Hughes, Brodsky, Ginsberg-a "who's who" of contemporary literature). Spender's writing recorded and distilled the emotional turbulence of many of the century's defining moments: the Spanish Civil War; the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism; World War II; the human rights struggle after the war; the Vietnam protest, the Cold War, and the 1960s sexual revolution; the rise of America as a cultural and political force. As David Leeming's fascinating biography demonstrates, Stephen Spender's life reflected the complexity and flux of the century in which he lived: his sexual ambivalence, his famous friends, the free-love days in Germany between the wars, the CIA-Encounter scandal. In David Leeming's capable hands, this comprehensive, unauthorized study of Spender is a meditation on modernity itself.
Stephen Spender, the son of a journalist, was born in London in 1909. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he met, among others, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, with whom he was to develop a poetics of engagement, writing powerfully of the confusion and alarm of 1930s Europe. He visited Spain during the Civil War, in 1937, where he assisted the Republican cause with propaganda activity. His post-war memoir World within World was recognised as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to have come out of the 1930s and 1940s, distilling a distinctively personal, humanistic socialism. His poetry has been praised for its exploratory candour, its personal approach to the stresses of modernity, and its exact portraiture of social and political upheaval. Grey Gowrie's new selection offers a timely and incisive revaluation of Spender's substantial poetic corpus.