Collected Poems 1928-1985

by Stephen Spender

For the revised and enlarged edition of his collected poems - reissued to celebrate his 80th birthday - Stephen Spender has made considerable changes from the text of the original edition of 1955. He has included a number of recent and unpublished poems, discarded several others and recast and rewritten much of the work in the earlier collection. Among recent poems included are remembrances of Louis MacNiece, Igor Stravinsky and W.H.Auden. There are also some early poems based on Rilke, Lorca and Altolguirre and choruses from Sir Stephen's translation of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy.

Genres: Poetry, British Literature

204 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Sir Stephen Harold Spender (February 28, 1909–July 16,1995) was an English poet, translator, literary critic and editor.

Spender 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

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here are two examples:

1.

My Parents

My parents kept me from children who were rough
Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes
Their thighs shown through rags. They ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron
Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

They were lithe, they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud
While I looked the other way, pretending to smile
I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

2.

Airman

He will watch the hawk with an indifferent eye
Or pitifully;
Nor on those eagles that so feared him, now
Will strain his brow;
Weapons men use, stone, sling and strong-thewed bow
He will not know.

This artistocrat, superb of all instinct,
With death close-linked
Had paced the enormous cloud, almost had won
War on the sun;
Till now, like Icarus mid-ocean-drowned,
Hands, wings, are found.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before reading this collection, the only Spender poem I was familiar with was the well worn 'The Truly Great'

I think continually 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 centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

I was vaguely aware of him as one of the 1930s Oxonian poets - Spender, Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis. It was coming across one of his poems extracted in a Raymond Carver collection that pushed me into seeking this collection out.

Spender's poems are beautifully crafted (which can make the earlier poems feel dated, with their careful rhyming patterns) and very clear - this clarity, he writes in his introduction, became the thing he recognised in what he felt were the best of his poems, and his aim in writing all along.

War features heavily in the collection - but is interspersed with elegy, polar expeditions, a series of poems written of and for his terminally-ill sister-in-law, love poems, what what I will call, for lack of a better phrase, 'observational poems'.

Two of the latter were among my favourite pieces in the collection. While 'The Pylons' is one of the most anthologised of Spender's poems (in it, he describes the English landscape, 'The valley with its gilt and evening look / and the green chestnut / of customary root' overtaken by the march of the pylons, 'those pillars / Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret', granting them the 'quick perspective of the future') it was two other poems that sing to the beauty and power of the machine and 'progress' that will stay with me:

The Express

After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Without bowing and with restrained unconcern
She passes the houses which humbly crowd outside,
The gasworks and at last the heavy page
Of death, printed by gravestones in the cemetery.
Beyond the town there lies the open country
Where, gathering speed, she acquires mystery,
The luminous self-possession of ships on ocean.
It is now she begins to sing-at first quite low
Then loud, and at last with a jazzy madness-
The song of her whistle screaming at curves,
Of deafening tunnels, brakes, innumerable bolts.
And always light, aerial, underneath,
Goes the elate metre of her wheels.
Steaming through metal landscape on her lines
She plunges new eras of wild happiness
Where speed throws up strange shapes, broad curves
And parallels clean like the steel of guns.
At last, further than Edinburgh or Rome,
Beyond the crest of the world, she reaches night
Where only a low streamline brightness
Of phosphorus on the tossing hills is white.
Ah, like a comet through flame, she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.

The Landscape near an Aerodrome

More beautiful and soft than any moth
With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path
Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines
Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall
To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls,
Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.

Lulled by descent, the travellers across sea
And across feminine land indulging its easy limbs
In miles of softness, now let their eyes trained by watching
Penetrate through dusk the outskirts of this town
Here where industry shows a fraying edge.
Here they may see what is being done.

Beyond the winking masthead light
And the landing-ground, they observe the outposts
Of work: chimneys like lank black fingers
Or figures frightening and mad: and squat buildings
With their strange air behind trees, like women’s faces
Shattered by grief. Here where few houses
Moan with faint light behind their blinds,
They remark the unhomely sense of complaint, like a dog
Shut out and shivering at the foreign moon.

In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields
Behind the aerodrome, where boys play all day
Hacking dead grass: whose cries, like wild birds
Settle upon the nearest roofs

But soon are hid under the loud city.
Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell
Reaching across the landscape of hysteria,

To where larger than all the charcoaled batteries
And imaged towers against that dying sky,
Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.

(These remind me a little of a set of photos I made today of aerial photos of New Zealand freezing works from the 1950s. There is a wonder to these machines and structures.)

A significant portion of the poems are elegies - the series for Margaret Spender, and also poems in memory of various peers. Spender focuses as much on the power of intellect as his love and fondness in these poems, (it's almost a biographical approach to memorial) and I came to love the way he describes the mind as a shining, lancing, entity.

The opening lines from 'Spiritual Explorations (For Cecil Day Lewis)':

We fly through a night of stars
Whose remote frozen tongues speak
A language of mirrors, mineral Greek
Glittering across space, each to each --'

From 'Auden at Milwaukee':

Dined with Auden. He'd been at Milwaukee
Three days, talking to the students.
...
He knows they're young and, better, that he's old.
He shares their distance from him like a joke.
They love him for it. This, because they feel
That he belongs to none, yet gives to all.
They see him as an object,. artefact, that time
Has ploughed criss-cross with all these lines
Yet has a core within that purely burns.

From 'Louis MacNeice':

Like skyscrapers with high windows staring down from the sun
Some faces suggest
Elevation. Their way-up eyes
Look down at you diagonally and their aloof
Hooded glance suggests
A laugh turning somersaults in some high penthouse
Of their skulls. ...

From 'Late Stravinsky Listening to Late Beethoven':

I see you on your bed under the ceiling
Weightless as your spirit, happiness
Shining through pain. You have become
Purged of every self but the transparent
Intelligence, through which the sounds revolve
Their furious machine. With delectation
You watch Beethoven rage, hammer
Crash plucked strings, escape
On wings transfiguring horizons: transcend
The discords in his head that were
The prisoning bars of deafness.

There's a strain of guilt to Spender's poetry (goodness knows his personal life was complex and sad) that touched me; of quite raw yet also measured, considered self-reflection. 'The Double Shame' captures this for me.

You must live through the time when everything hurts
When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone,
And the walking eyes throw flinty comments
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.

Solid and usual objects are ghosts
The furniture carries cargoes of memory,
The staircase has corners which remember
As fire blows red in gusty embers,
And each empty dress cuts out an image
In fur and evening and summer and gold
Of her who was different in each.

Pull down the blind and lie on the bed
And clasp the hour in the glass of one room
Against your mouth like a crystal doom.
Take up the book and look at the letters
Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless
Here birds crossed once and cries were uttered
In a mist where sight and sound are blurred.

For the story of those who made mistakes
Of one whose happiness pierced like a star
Eludes and evades between sentences
And the letters break into eyes which read
What the blood is now writing in your head,
As though the characters sought for some clue
To their being so perfectly living and dead
In your story, worse than theirs, but true.

Set in the mind of their poet, they compare
Their tragic bliss with your trivial despair
And they have fingers which accuse
You of the double way of shame.
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame.

'And the words which carry most knives are the blind / Phrases searching to be kind.' - it's a line you can't read without shuddering in recognition.

Spender is often bracketed (perhaps less favourably) with Auden. He has a sensuality however that I don't think I find in Auden - one of my favourite single lines, which I kept returning to -- 'the supple surface of summer-brown muscle' -- is not one I could ever imagine from Auden. But it's a poem that's not in the collection that hits me right in that soft spot I have for poems that shimmer with a dreamy sexiness, a delicate but not shy physicality: 'O Night O Trembling Night"

O night O trembling night O night of sighs
O night when my body was a rod O night
When my mouth was a vague animal cry
Pasturing on her flesh O night
When the close darkness was a nest
Made of her hair and filled with my eyes

(O stars impenetrable above
The fragile tent poled with our thighs
Among the petals falling fields of time
O night revolving all our dark away)

O day O gradual day O sheeted light
Covering her body as with dews
Until I brushed her sealing sleep away
To read once more in the uncurtained day
Her naked love, my great good news.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry of the sort Spender writes is not the sort of thing I typically read, and if I had not been assigned this book for university, I do not know whether I would have read it. On the one hand, Spender's meaning is relatively accessible, as he generally employs straightforward language in his poetry. On the other hand, unless I am missing it, for me the poems are lacking in the kind of thing I look for in poetry: allusiveness, figurative language, and experiments with form (the kinds of things I find in the poetry by writers like Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats or T.S. Eliot, to give a few examples).

Several of the poems in this collection are elegiac, including some written following the passing of fellow poets Louis MacNeice and W.H Auden. A number of other poems are on the theme of war. Towards the end of the book, Spender's writing draws more upon his personal experiences, and particularly his life with his family.

Acquired sometime between 1999 and 2004
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stephen Spender's Collected Poems is one of my fossil books. A book acquired so many years ago that it has petrified under the weight of subsequent purchases. Reading it now I am unsure who gave it to me or why I asked for it (I'm pretty sure that it was a birthday present). Indeed I wonder if I would even have remembered who Stephen Spender was had it not been sitting on my shelf glaring balefully at me these many years.

Of the poems themselves the selections entitled War Poems, Home, and Landscape and Seascape contained those that were most likely to strike a chord. This is perhaps because they are the ones that need least context to understand. Boy, Cat, Canary I thought particularly fine as an exploration of childhood and tragedy.

I don't know if anyone still reads Spender. Auden dominates mid Twentieth century poetry and others feel as though they trail along in his wake.

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

"the truly great" is def his best poem, the rest *shrug*

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite Poems:

“Polar Expedition”
“One More New Botched Beginning”

[Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yeesh. If this collection culls those that are "confused or verbose" and those that remain are "simple and straightforward" as he claimed, one should be grateful for not having to wade through those that were left behind. Not many books would I categorize a waste of time, even those stinky ones that are memorable for their stinkiness, but this is self-absorbed, pompous, less-than-veiled homophobic, completely forgettable, and quintessentially English; it's not difficult to see why this author received the accolades that culture assigned him.

[SB · Rating 5 out of 5]

why 5 stars? yeah, i know that some of the poems in this book does not stand up to its worth, but what strikes me the most is the simplicity in the poems. there is a fascinating simplicity in each and every poems in this book which shows the strength of stephen spender's poetic genius. i had read some of his poems from palgrave's 'golden treasury' but i craved more to read his poems. and, this collection is very good, though i am also looking for the new collected poems of stephen spender, the latest edition. and, while reading, i found two extraordinary things (presumably) - 1. his poems situate between modernism and postmodernism. his poems are the in-betweener in these two ages. and 2. one of spender's strength is he knows how to use his weakness as a weapon to his poetic strength. and, he is quite successful in it. his biggest fear is his trauma of war. and, he beautifully brings his fear as the means of poetic strength. there are multiple poems in the book which deals with war (even one section was named as 'war poems' and some of the poems in the 'spain' section also talks about the spanish civil war), and that war-trauma theme is brilliantly used. besides, there is a nostalgia in his poems, basically in the poems written for other poets and specially, romantic poems. stephen spender is one of the most important poets of his time, just like joseph conrad was one of the important writers in his time and in the later times. but, to choose, 'choruses from the oedipus trilogy' is the best part in this collection.

why 5 stars? because it is worthy for that.

[Hans Ostrom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Spender's voice is among the quieter, less pretentious ones in the Modernist era, yet Spender was able to reflect in his poetry much of the turmoil of the era. Exceptionally well crafted verse.

[Eduardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant poetry!

[Nick Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great collection, but I recommend you buy the much more complete edition of his poems arranged in chronological order: New Collected Poems (2004, edited by Michael Brett).