Stephen Spender
in full Sir Stephen Harold Spender
born February 28, 1909, London, England
died July 16, 1995, London
English poet and critic, who made his
reputation in the 1930s with poems
expressing the politically
conscience-stricken, leftist “new writing”
of that period.
A nephew of the Liberal journalist and
biographer J.A. Spender, he was educated at
University College School, London, and at
University College, Oxford. While an
undergraduate he met the poets W.H. Auden
and C. Day-Lewis, and during 1930–33 he
spent many months in Germany with the writer
Christopher Isherwood. Among important
influences shown in his early volumes—Poems
(1933), Vienna (1934), Trial of a Judge, a
verse play (1938), and The Still Centre
(1939)—were the poetry of the German Rainer
Maria Rilke and of the Spaniard Federico
García Lorca. Above all, his poems expressed
a self-critical, compassionate personality.
In the following decades Spender, in some
ways a more personal poet than his early
associates, became increasingly more
autobiographical, turning his gaze from the
external topical situation to the subjective
experience. His reputation for humanism and
honesty is fully vindicated in subsequent
volumes—Ruins and Visions (1942), Poems of
Dedication (1947), The Edge of Being (1949),
Collected Poems (1955), Selected Poems
(1965), The Generous Days (1971), and
Dolphins (1994).
From the 1940s Spender was better known
for his perceptive criticism and his
editorial association with the influential
reviews Horizon (1940–41) and Encounter
(1953–67) than he was as a poet. Spender’s
prose works include short stories (The
Burning Cactus, 1936), a novel (The Backward
Son, 1940), literary criticism (The
Destructive Element, 1935; The Creative
Element, 1953; The Making of a Poem, 1955;
The Struggle of the Modern, 1963), an
autobiography (World Within World, 1951;
reissued 1994), and uncollected essays with
new commentary (The Thirties and After,
1978).
During World War II Spender was a member
of the National Fire Service (1941–44).
After the war he made several visits to the
United States, teaching and lecturing at
universities, and in 1965 he became the
first non-American to serve as poetry
consultant to the Library of Congress (now
poet laureate consultant in poetry), a
position he held for one year. In 1970 he
was appointed professor of English at
University College, London; he became
professor emeritus in 1977. Spender was
knighted in 1983, and he made headlines in
1994 and 1995 when he brought a highly
publicized plagiarism suit against novelist
David Leavitt; the latter was accused of
having borrowed material from Spender’s
autobiography for his novel While England
Sleeps. Leavitt ultimately revised his work,
but not before a vitriolic airing of the
controversy in the pages of the leading
journals in London and New York.
