Spender, Sir Stephen Harold

Spender, Sir Stephen Harold (1909–95), poet and critic, educated at University College, Oxford, where he became friendly with Auden and MacNeice and met Isherwood. After leaving Oxford he lived in Germany for a period, an experience which sharpened his political consciousness. His Poems (1933) contained both personal and political poems, including ‘The Landscape near an Aerodrome’, and ‘The Pylons’, which gave the nickname of ‘Pylon poets’ to himself and his friends. He also published a critical work, The Destructive Element (1935), largely on H. James, T. S. Eliot, and Yeats. During the Spanish Civil War he did propaganda work in Spain for the Republican side, a period reflected in his volume of poems The Still Centre (1939). A gradual shift in his political allegiances may be seen in his poetry, in his critical works (e.g. The Creative Element, 1953), and in his contribution to The God That Failed; he also gives an account of his relationship with the Communist Party in his autobiography World Within World (1951). His interest in the public and social role and duty of the writer has tended to obscure the essentially personal and private nature of much of his own poetry, including his elegies for his sister-in-law, in Poems of Dedication (1947), and many of the poems in such later volumes as Collected Poems 1928– 1953 (1955). His other works include Trial of a Judge (1938); many translations; and The Thirties and After (1978, a volume of memoirs). His Collected Poems 1982–85 and his Journals 1939–83 were both published in 1985.