Download or read book Stephen Spender written by John Sutherland and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-06 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the leading poets and cultural icons of the 20th century, Stephen Spender was a prominent writer, literary critic, and social commentator--and close friend of some of the best-know creative talents of his day. Now, in this penetrating biography, John Sutherland paints a vivid portrait of Spender and of the glittering literary world of which he was a part, drawing on exclusive access to Spender's private papers. This briskly paced, compelling narrative illuminates the vast range of Spender's literary, political, and artistic interests. We follow Spender from childhood to his days at Oxford (where he first became friends with W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Isaiah Berlin); to his meteoric rise as poet in the 1930s, while still in his twenties; to his later years as cultural statesman, at home in both Britain and America. We witness many of the century's defining moments through Spender's eyes: the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Cold War, the 1960s sexual revolution, and the rise of America as a cultural force. And along the way, we are introduced to many of Spender's accomplished friends, including Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Cecil Day-Lewis, Joseph Brodsky, Lucian Freud, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. Perhaps most important, Sutherland has been granted exclusive access to Spender's private papers by his wife Natasha Spender. Thus he is able to provide a far more intimate look at the poet's personal life than has appeared in previous biographies. Featuring 36 unpublished photographs, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life throws light not only on this supremely gifted writer, but also on the literary and social history of the twentieth century.
Download or read book World Within World written by Stephen Spender and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the British poet's autobiography, including portraits of friends Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, and Christopher Isherwood.
Download or read book The Worlds of Stephen Spender written by Ben Eastham and published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British poet Stephen Spender (1909-95), through his life spanning the 20th century, befriended, collected or was otherwise connected to a pantheon of artists such as Arp, Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Giacometti, Gorky, Guston, Hockney, Moore, Morandi, Picasso and others. Including examples of their work as well Spender's poems chosen by Auerbach, this publication is addressed to what Spender termed the "shared subject matter" of art and literature. Interweaving poetry, essay, artwork and generous archival photographs, The Worlds of Stephen Spender: I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great takes for its inspiration themes that preoccupied Spender and which have taken on a renewed urgency: art's movement across borders; collaboration between artists and writers; solidarity against their censorship; and the moral responsibility of the creative individual in times of social crisis.
Download or read book The Temple written by Stephen Spender and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beyond the wonderful insights ... there is a portrait of the world in the eye of the storm between two world wars. It is a novel of awakening -- awakening to sex, yes ... but also an awakening to the presence of evil in the world and to the possibilities of love and friendship." -- The Bloomsbury Review
Download or read book The Generous Days written by Stephen Spender and published by London : (3 Queen Sq., WC1N 3AU), Faber and Faber Limited. This book was released on 1971-01-01 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A House in St John s Wood written by Matthew Spender and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A son's personal exploration of one of the most influential—and troubled—artistic couples of the twentieth century Stephen Spender's life, with all its secrets, successes, and contradictions, is a vivid prism through which to view the twentieth century. He befriended Auden and Isherwood while at Oxford, and together the three had wildly transgressive adventures in Europe and were early vocal critics of Hitler and the rise of fascism in their celebrated writings. Like his friends, Spender was drawn to other men, yet he eventually married Natasha, a world-renowned concert pianist, and started a family. In the midst of a heady world of poetry and liberal politics, gay love affairs and tense silences, Matthew Spender grew up the child of two brilliant artists. Taught how to use adjectives by Uncle Auden and raised among the British cultural elite, Matthew led what might have been a charmed existence were it not for the tensions in his own household. His father, always susceptible to the allure of young men, was unable to stop himself, or reveal his secret, for the sake of his family; and his mother's suffering led her to infatuations of her own. Stephen Spender: In Search of My Father is a son's attempt to reconstruct a portrait of his magnetic father and unconventional family out of the ambiguous experiences of his childhood. Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries, family keepsakes and youthful memories, Matthew Spender tells the story of a singular family in the midst of its own cold war, as the artistic world of mid-century London circled around them.
Download or read book The Year of the Young Rebels written by Stephen Spender and published by New York : Random House. This book was released on 1969 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Selected Poems of Stephen Spender written by Stephen Spender and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Spender, the son of a journalist, was born in London in 1909. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he met, among others, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, with whom he was to develop a poetics of engagement, writing powerfully of the confusion and alarm of 1930s Europe. He visited Spain during the Civil War, in 1937, where he assisted the Republican cause with propaganda activity. His post-war memoir World within World was recognised as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to have come out of the 1930s and 1940s, distilling a distinctively personal, humanistic socialism. His poetry has been praised for its exploratory candour, its personal approach to the stresses of modernity, and its exact portraiture of social and political upheaval. Grey Gowrie's new selection offers a timely and incisive revaluation of Spender's substantial poetic corpus.
Download or read book The Struggle of the Modern written by Stephen Spender and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shelley said, in his Defence of Poetry, that poetry should be both centre and circumference of knowledge. In his new book, Spender takes Shelley's claim and relates it to modern literature. He points out that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, writers have been conscious of there being a problem of creating literature in the industrial era. All the discussions of tradition, symbolism, myth and the rest are part of a conscious strategy of writers to come to terms with a modern world which they feel presents quite special problems for them. Spender shows how Matthew Arnold's idea that criticism might be more important than poetry in our time, was taken over by poets who wrote criticism, and how in tern they have become superseded by critics who write poetry. The critical intelligence tens to absorb creative energy. He discusses the difference between the creative and critical functions and things that the present tendency of criticism to supersede creativity, and for poetry to become an academic exercise conducted by poets who are dons, is having a stifling effect on poetry. He thinks that there is an increasing tendency for the most creative activity of literature to become shut off from life and fermented, and that literature should be related much more to contemporary history, and less to dogmatic principles of academic criticism. This is a book in which the writer tried to reassert the relationship of literature to modern life. He believes that this relationship was the pre-occupation of writers in the 1920s and 1930, but that since then literature has become increasingly split into the writing of the new academics and that of aggressive anti-intellectuals. He things that contemporary criticism should be on a much wider basis, and take into account the history and the society in which we live, as well as the abstract principles which recent critics have evolved. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.
Download or read book New Selected Journals 1939 1995 written by Stephen Spender and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places. W.H. Auden, dedication to Stephen Spender, 1932 Stephen Spender wrote almost a million words of journal entries between his September Journal in 1939 and his death in 1995. In choosing from these voluminous journals for the new edition, the editors have tried to provide a picture of the various lives Spender brought together in autobiographical form. The earlier 1985 edition of the Journals was overseen by the author, and it privileged his thoughts about poetry - his own and other people's. The new edition includes the final ten years of Spender's life and provides access to the more intimate thoughts and feelings of the private man, but equally documents his life as a public intellectual who played a part in shaping the European literary and intellectual culture of his age. As we look back on the dramatic events of the twentieth century, we find that Spender was involved in many of them: the reconstruction of Germany and the construction of Europe (as Unesco's first Literary Councillor), the development of the cultural Cold War (as editor of Encounter), the founding of Israel, the anti-Vietnam movement in America. The Journals provide a personal version of sixty turbulent years of the twentieth century, hovering between diary, autobiography and history.
Download or read book China Diary written by Stephen Spender and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 1993 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors describe their experiences traveling in China and share their impressions of the Chinese people and culture
Download or read book Poems of Dedication written by Stephen Spender and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Poems Written Abroad written by Stephen Spender and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems Written Abroad is the first publication of the earliest collection of poetry by the famous poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, and radical, Sir Stephen Spender (1909-1995). Spender wrote and compiled this manuscript in 1927, when he was living in Nantes and Lausanne. In tone and diction, Spender’s poems range from creatively traditional to unexpectedly innovative. They reflect his reading in Shakespeare and French poetry, as well as his absorption in music and modern art. They also document his struggles with his sexual identity and his emerging desire to devote his life, at whatever cost, to the writing of poetry. This beautiful facsimile edition, authorized by the Spender estate, faithfully reproduces the features of the original manuscript now held by the Lilly Library, including the frontispiece, an ink drawing by Spender himself, and little-known photographs of the poet. The editor’s extensive introduction and detailed explanatory notes situate Spender’s juvenilia in the context of his life and work and the history of modern poetry. The volume will appeal to readers with interests in modern poetry, gender studies, and fine books.
Download or read book Stephen Spender written by David Leeming and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first critical biography of one of the twentieth century's towering literary figures. Stephen Spender was a minor poet, but a major cultural influence during much of the century. Literary critic, journalist, art critic, social commentator, and friendend of the best-known cultural figures of the modernist and postmodernist periods (Yeats, Woolf, Sartre, Auden, Eliot, Isherwood, Hughes, Brodsky, Ginsberg-a "who's who" of contemporary literature). Spender's writing recorded and distilled the emotional turbulence of many of the century's defining moments: the Spanish Civil War; the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism; World War II; the human rights struggle after the war; the Vietnam protest, the Cold War, and the 1960s sexual revolution; the rise of America as a cultural and political force. As David Leeming's fascinating biography demonstrates, Stephen Spender's life reflected the complexity and flux of the century in which he lived: his sexual ambivalence, his famous friends, the free-love days in Germany between the wars, the CIA-Encounter scandal. In David Leeming's capable hands, this comprehensive, unauthorized study of Spender is a meditation on modernity itself.
Download or read book D H Lawrence written by Stephen Spender and published by London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson. This book was released on 1973 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawrence was a novelist in the English tradition and also a prophet who related all his ideas to the restless debate going on in his mind about love and sex. The extremes of his personality and his views have provoked nearly all the contributors in this volume to write far beyond the space allotted to each. Some of these essays will be essential reading to the Lawrence student, whilst the collection as a whole will provide an important introduction to him in his time, his friends, and the many places in which he lives and worked.
Download or read book European Witness written by Stephen Spender and published by Greenwood Publishing Group. This book was released on 1946 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Spender was one of a group of highly influential left-wing writers and artists who came to prominence in Britain in the 1930s, including W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood.
Download or read book The Faber Book of Modern Verse written by Michael Roberts and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in February 1936, just under a year from when the idea for it was first discussed, this is one of the most important and influential anthologies of the twentieth century. Since then three further editions by, in succession, Anne Ridler, Donald Hall and Peter Porter have been published. All took as their kernel the original selection by Michael Roberts. This "Faber Finds" reissue restores that pristine selection. More likely than not, the original idea was T. S. Eliot's, the choice of editor was undoubtedly his, and it was an inspired one. Michael Roberts was a poet himself, and a good one, but more important for this task was his acute awareness of the poetry scene, and his sense of the modern movement within it. Yes, his purpose was tendentious. He excludes some poets he admires such as Edmund Blunden and Walter de la Mare because (they) 'seem to me to have written good poems without having been compelled to make any notable development of poetic technique.' On the other hand, 'I have included only poems which seem to me to add to the resources of poetry, to be likely to influence the future development of poetry and language . . .' From the very start (and could there be a more arresting one?) with Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Deutschland" Michael Roberts powerfully and consistently fulfils that aim. Philip Hobsbaum, in "The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry," says of "The Faber Book of Modern Verse," 'it also encapsulates, as no other literary document quite does, the innovative quality of the 1930s.'
