The Poetry of Spender by Stephen Spender
"The Poetry of Spender" by Stephen Spender presents a curated selection of the poet's work over twenty-five years, emphasizing his evolution and reflections on contemporary history, love, and separation. Spender's collection, described metaphorically as "a weeded, though not a tidied up or altered garden," includes poems that reveal his youthful flaws and beliefs he has since abandoned, showcasing an authentic journey through his poetic development. The volume also includes dedications to fellow poets from the Oxford Group, highlighting the influence of literary contemporaries like W. H. Auden and Wilfred Owen on his themes and style.
Spender's work resonates with a romantic and emotional quality, often contrasting the bleakness of human existence with a hopeful vision for the future, akin to the approaches of poets such as Shelley and Whitman. His poetry is characterized by a deep compassion for suffering, expressed through both personal and political themes, capturing the complexities of love, camaraderie, and the human experience. While some critics view his introspective pieces as less impactful, Spender’s ability to merge modern language with evocative imagery remains noteworthy, exemplified in poems that blend technical language with emotional depth. Ultimately, "The Poetry of Spender" serves as both a reflection of a significant poet's life and an exploration of the broader human condition, inviting readers to engage with the nuances of his work.
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The Poetry of Spender by Stephen Spender
First published:Nine Entertainments, 1928; Twenty Poems, 1930; Poems, 1933; Poems, 1934; Vienna, 1935; The Still Centre, 1939; Ruins and Visions, 1942; Poems of Dedication, 1947; Returning to Vienna, 1947; The Edge of Being, 1949; Collected Poems, 1928-1953, 1955
Type of work: Poetry
Critical Evaluation:
Stephen Spender explains in a brief introduction to his COLLECTED POEMS that the volume does not contain his entire poetic output over a period of twenty-five years, but rather a selection of those poems which he wished to gather together from earlier volumes with an aim “to retrieve as many past mistakes, and to make as many improvements, as possible, without ’cheating.’” He admits that he has altered a few readings here and there in the interest of clarity or aesthetics, but adds that he has retained, in the interest of honesty and truth, certain passages in which he now recognizes youthful imperfections and a few poems which reflect views he no longer holds. As printed, the poems have been grouped to represent roughly his development as a poet, as well as his interest in contemporary history—chiefly the Spanish Civil War and World War II—and in such eternal themes as love and separation. He views his book as “a weeded, though not a tidied up or altered garden.”
The volume gives an opportunity for a studied reappraisal of one of a group of English poets who first achieved fame between the two world wars. The members of the Oxford Group, as they have sometimes been called, included W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Cecil Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. Spender dedicates three of his groups of poems to the first three of these poets. Though Spender has written elsewhere of the “teacher-to-pupil” relationship between Auden and himself at Oxford, his later development as a poet has been largely an independent one.
This is not to say, however, that he has followed poetic paths never traveled before. Some of his critics have compared him to Shelley, for the young Spender was also a rebel against the society of his time; and in both poets criticism of their own eras is combined with a vision of a future, better time. Both saw themselves somewhat as prophets of their respective ages. Shelley addressed the West Wind:
Be through my lips to unawakened
More than a century later Spender exhorted, in “Exiles from Their Land, History Their Domicile”:
Speak with your tongues,
Though some similarities of attitude and theme are to be found in poems of Shelley and Spender, their poetic techniques are as different as the times in which they lived. Spender is as romantically emotional as Shelley: he believes in the unmistakable love of man for his fellow man; he often opposes the darkness of man’s life with the bright sun which brings light and warmth into it. But Spender’s poems echo twentieth-century phrasing, though some lines might be described as Shelleyan, as in the beautiful lyric which begins, “I think continually of those who were truly great.”
At times Spender reminds one of T. S. Eliot (and Auden too), as in “The Uncreating Chaos”:
Shall I never reach
Spender himself has said, however, that he was more influenced by Wilfred Owen than by Eliot. Like Owen, Spender often employs subtle combinations of sound effects, as in the lines quoted above: “Where the scytheless wind/Flushes the swayed grasses.” Owen’s poetry was principally inspired by World War I, which brought early death to the poet whose pity had been stirred by the suffering and dying which he had witnessed. Spender seems to have been influenced not only by Owen’s bitterness against the bloody injustices of the world, but also by what he himself had learned of war during his months in Spain and later in the Battle of Britain and even more directly, perhaps, by the content of certain of Owen’s war poems. Compare, for example, Spender’s “Two Armies,” which describes enemy forces resting at night only a few yards apart,
When the machines are stilled, a com-
with Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” an unfinished poem in which a soldier dreams he meets in Hell the enemy whom he killed and discovers in that “strange friend” the same hope and pity and compassion that was in his own heart.
In a critical essay on Auden which Spender published several years ago in the Atlantic Monthly (July, 1953), he pointed out that the essential direction of Auden’s poetry has been toward a definition of Love. The reader of the COLLECTED POEMS discovers that, like his slightly older friend and mentor, Spender has written a series of variations on the same theme. In the early poems the love seems often like Whitman’s “manly love of comrades,” even to the point of suggesting Whitmanesque ambiguities, as in the poem which begins “How strangely this sun reminds me of my love” or another which addresses directly an unnamed “Abrupt and charming mover.” One is reminded of Whitman again in the hortatory “Oh young men, oh young comrades,” in which the theme of loving comradeship is combined with the call to desert the dusty past, to leave the “great houses where the ghosts are prisoned,” and to make a new and better world:
Oh comrades, step beautifully from the
In other lyrics, as in the lovely sonnet “Daybreak,” which describes a couple waking at dawn, first the man, then the woman, one finds both tenderness and the passionate intensity that suffuses so much of the poetry of D. H. Lawrence. But the mixture of desire and revulsion which unpleasantly mars so many of Lawrence’s love poems is not in Spender. In Lawrence’s “Lightning,” for example, a lightning flash reveals to a lover the fear in the face of the woman he is preparing to kiss, and his passion is followed by hatred of both the woman and himself. Contrast with this Spender’s “Ice,” in which a woman comes “in from the snowing air” and is greeted by a kiss:
Then my lips ran to her with fire
The love of man and woman shows no hectic flush in Spender; the colors are those of radiant health.
Another aspect of love is revealed in Spender’s numerous poems about children. Several are about his daughter, but the group titled “Elegy for Margaret” are to or about the niece who died after a long, wasting illness on Christmas Day, 1945. Here, though there are morbid lines which describe the progress of the disease, the whole elegy is filled with pity and sorrow for both the child and her parents; and the final poem, in which he attempts to console his “Dearest and nearest brother,” is as moving as anything that Spender has written.
Many of the poems for which Spender is best known were published in his widely reviewed POEMS (1933). In the COLLECTED POEMS these are reprinted in a group under the title “Preludes.” Here one finds such familiar poems as “The Express” and “The Landscape near an Aerodrome,” both of which illustrate Spender’s early interest in enlarging the language of modern poetry through the use of terms drawn from science, machinery, and industry. The first opens:
After the first powerful, plain manifesto
The blending of the names of mechanical objects with language more usual in poetry is so skillfully achieved that the train becomes a mighty poem in motion. “The Express” is perhaps the finest train poem since Walt Whitman’s portrait of a very different train in “To a Locomotive in Winter.”
“The Landscape near an Aerodrome” contains poetic beauty like that in “The Express,” but it is weakened by the attempt to combine arresting description with social commentary. The poem begins with the picture of a gliding air liner and then contrasts the quiet descent of the great machine with the scenes of squalor and misery which become clearer to the passengers as they approach the aerodrome. It ends with a sudden, trenchant last line that not only surprises the reader but seems totally uncalled-for by the preceding descriptive lines:
Then, as they land, they hear the toll-
Several of the “Preludes” and two or three poems in the next group, “A Heaven-Printed World,” belong to the literature of protest of the 1930’s and reflect Spender’s leftwing politics which he later forswore. These poems, as Spender has said, “did not please the politicians.” Notable are “The Funeral,” “The Pylons,” and “An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum.” The last is full of the pity which is deep in Spender’s poems, political or otherwise.
The introspective poems in the group called “Explorations” are as a whole less impressive than those in the other groups. Rather hazy and inchoate, these “explorations,” when compared with Spender’s other poems, lead one to conclude that he is a sensitive but not a cerebral poet.
It has been said that Spender is a humorless poet. He does usually take himself seriously, often too much so; but the gracefully witty conceit in one of his later poems called “Word” refutes the charge against him:
The word bites like a fish.