Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE, (February 28, 1909 – July 16, 1995) was an English poet and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work.

Early life

---

Born in London to a journalist father, Spender went to Gresham's School, Holt, and University College, Oxford, where he met W. H. Auden. He did not finish his degree and went to Germany. (However, he was made an honorary fellow of the college in 1973.) Around this time he was also friends with Christopher Isherwood (who had also lived in Weimar Germany), and fellow Macspaunday members Louis MacNeice, and C. Day Lewis. He would later come to know W.B. Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre and T. S. Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf.

His early poetry, notably Poems (1933) was often inspired by social protest. His convictions found further expression in Vienna (1934], a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Viennese socialists, and in Trial of a Judge (1938), an anti-Fascist drama in verse. His autobiography, World within World (1951), is a re-creation of much of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s.

Spender began work on a novel in 1929, which was not published until 1988 under the title The Temple. The novel is about a young man who travels to Germany and finds a culture at once more open than England—particularly about relationships between men—and showing frightening anticipations of Nazism, which are confusingly related to the very openness the main character admires. Spender says in his 1988 introduction:

In the late Twenties young English writers were more concerned with censorship than with politics.... 1929 was the last year of that strange Indian Summer -- the Weimar Republic. For many of my friends and for myself, Germany seemed a paradise where there was no censorship and young Germans enjoyed extraordinary freedom in their lives....

The war years

---

When the Spanish civil war began, he went with the International Brigades to fight against Francisco Franco's fascist forces. Harry Pollitt, head of the Communist Party, told Spender "to go and get killed; we need a Byron in the movement."

A member of the political left wing during this early period, he was one of those who wrote of their disillusionment with communism in the essay collection The God that Failed (1949), along with Arthur Koestler and others. It is thought that one of the big areas of disappointment was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which many leftists saw as a betrayal. Like fellow poets W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and several other outspoken opponents of fascism in the 1930s, Spender managed to avoid serving in the military in World War II. However, he did not go to America but spent the war in the London fire service.

He felt close to the Jewish people; his mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, was half Jewish (her father's family were German Jews who converted to Christianity, while her mother came from an upper-class family of Catholic German, Lutheran Danish and distantly Italian descent). Spender's second wife, Natasha Litvin/Lady Spender, whom he married in 1941, was also Jewish.

With Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson Spender co-founded Horizon magazine and served as its editor from 1939 to 1941. He was editor of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1966. Spender taught at various American institutions, accepting the Elliston Chair of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati in 1954. In 1961 he became professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.

Late life

---

He was Professor of English at University College, London, 1970-77, and then became Professor Emeritus.

Spender was made a CBE in 1962 and knighted in 1983.

Sexuality

---

Spender sued gay author David Leavitt for allegedly using his relationship with "Jimmy Younger" in Leavitt's While England Sleeps in 1994. The case was settled out of court with Leavitt removing certain portions from his text.

Spender's sexuality has been the subject of debate. Spender's seemingly changing attitudes towards homosexuality and heterosexuality have caused him to be labeled bisexual, repressed, latently homophobic, or simply someone so complex as to resist easy labelling. Many of his friends in his earlier years were gay. Spender himself had many affairs with men in his earlier years, most notably with Tony Hyndman (who is called "Jimmy Younger" in his memoir World Within World). During World War II, he shifted his focus to heterosexuality, marrying concert pianist Natasha Litvin in 1941. Subsequently, he toned down homosexual allusions in later editions of his poetry. The following line was revised in a republished edition:

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution.

It was later revised to read:

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution.

In 1980, following a lecture in Oneonta, New York, Spender's plane was grounded due to bad weather, so he took a taxi 287 miles to Manhattan for a date with Jacqueline Onassis. "I simply had to get there," he said.

Selected bibliography

---

Poetry

• Twenty Poems (1930)
• Vienna (1934)
• Poems of Dedication (1936)
• The Still Centre (1939)
• Collected Poems, 1928-1953 (1955)
• The Generous Days (1971)
• Selected Poems (1974)
• Collected Poems 1928-1985 (1986)
• New Collected Poems Edited by Michael Brett, 2004

Letters

• Letters (1980)

Essays

• The Destructive Element (1935)
• European Witness (1946)
• The God That Failed ((1949) - with others, ex-Communists' testimonies)
• The Creative Element (1953)
• The Making of a Poem (1955)
• The Struggle of the Modern (1963)
• Love-Hate Relations (1974)
• The Thirties and After (1978)

Drama

• Trial of a Judge (1938)

Memoir

• World Within World (1951)

Fiction

• The Backward Son (1940)
• The Temple (1986-1987)

Notes

---

1. Quoted in Richard R. Bozorth, "But Who Would Get It?": Auden and the Codes of Poetry and Desire (ELH 62.3 ^* 709-727).

Further reading

---

• Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (2005) ISBN 0195178165

See also

---

• List of Gresham Professors of Rhetoric

External links

---

• Stephen Spender Memorial Trust
• NY Review of books bibliography
• "Spender's Lives" - Ian Hamilton, The New Yorker
• "Stephen Spender, Toady: Was there any substance to his politics and art?" – Stephen Metcalf, Slate.com, February 7, 2005

English essayists | English poets | Spanish Civil War people | UCL academics | Former students of University College, Oxford | Commanders of the Order of the British Empire | Gay writers | 1909 births | 1995 deaths