Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender (1909-1995), English poet, literary critic, and editor. He was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford, where he first became associated with other such 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, are a detailed account of his times and contemporaries. With his early works, notably Poems (1933), Spender attracted attention as an eloquent champion of the radical labour movement. 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. After the 1939 pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, Spender developed more conservative views. His other works include World Within World (1951), an autobiography; The Making of a Poem (1962), a critical study; Collected Poems 1928-1985 (1986); and Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities (1974), about literary exchanges between Britain and the United States. He edited Horizon magazine from 1939 to 1941 and Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1967. Spender taught at various US institutions, accepting the Elliston Chair of Poetry at Cincinnati University in 1953. In 1970 he was appointed professor of English at University College, London. In 1983 he was knighted. Spender's lyric verse treats technological aspects of the modern world.