Spender, Stephen (1909-1995), was an English poet. His best-known poetry is a blend of traditional Romanticism and thoroughly modern subject matter and attitudes. Thus, he found in an express train the sort of beauty earlier Romantic poets found in waterfalls and sunsets. In “The Express,” he wrote:
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.
From Stephen Spender’s COLLECTED POEMS 1928-1953, copyright 1955, courtesy Random House, Inc., Faber & Faber, Ltd.
Spender was born on Feb. 28, 1909, in London. He attended Oxford University and there gained recognition in the 1930’s as one of a group of poets led by his friend W. H. Auden.
Spender’s Journals: 1939-1983 and his Collected Poems: 1928-1985 were published in 1983 and 1986, respectively. His criticism was collected in The Destructive Element (1935), The Creative Element (1953), and The Making of a Poem (1962). Spender also wrote drama, fiction, and translations, as well as the autobiographical World Within World (1951). Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1983, and he became known as Sir Stephen Spender. He died on July 16, 1995.
