From false ideals to modernity

The name of Stephen Spender will always be associated with those of W.H. Auden, Louis MacNiece and C. Day Lewis--the four young British poets of the 1930s who brought English poetry out of a past of false ideals and into modernity. Rejecting the preoccupations of their pastoral and Romantic predecessors, the "Oxford Boys" revolutionized poetic themes and techniques to serve the hard reality of an "unpoetic," mechanized present. But it was Spender in particular who, as Louis Untermeyer put it in Saturday Review, "transformed material considered too raw and crude for poetry. He invoked the magic of machinery; he packed an epic of travel into a sonnet contrasting a picturesque but fading past with the sharp contours of the present."

Spender abandoned an older conception of the poet as "a kind of shadowy prophet behind the throne of power" in favor of a new idea of the poet as translator of a world which men have created around themselves through actions of the will. "I believed now," writes Spender in his autobiography World Within World, "that everything which men make and invent is to some degree a symbol of an inner state of consciousness within them...Poetry was a use of language which revealed external actuality as symbolic inner consciousness." Intrigued by the kind of hard, clear imagery that he soon incorporated into his own work, Spender discovered that things traditionally considered ugly and unpoetic were in fact the raw materials of modern poetry. "What seemed petrified, overwhelming and intractable could be melted down again by poetry into their symbolic aspects."

Spender places himself outside of the movement of modern poets who adopted causes of philosophies out of a need for an external impulse that would take their work beyond simply personal experience, yet both he and his contemporaries have been characterized by a particular social consciousness inspired by the issues peculiar to their age. Whereas the previous generation of poets chronicled the collapse of an older Europe, Spender reacted through his work to the growing problems of the 1930's: economic crisis, unemployment, nascent Fascism and the coming war.

We were divided between our literary vocation and an urge to save the world from Fascism. The impulse to act was not mistaken. But the action we took may not have been of the right kind. It was for the most part the half-and-half action of people divided between their artistic and public conscience, and unable to fuse the two.

Spender asserts that critics like Virginia Woolf, who condemned him and others for writing too much out of a sense of public duty, "failed to see that public events had swamped our personal lives and usurped our personal experience."

Spender became "spiritually" engaged by the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and went to Spain as a reporter in the winter of 1936. As an "independent witness" he hoped to use his poetry to convey what he believed to be the meaning of the Fascist-Anti-Fascist struggle, in which he saw the fundamental moral issues of liberty, equality and justice at stake.

In The Destructive Element, published in 1936, Spender argues that the greatest good an artist can accomplish is to "discover a system of values that are not purely subjective and individualistic, but objective and social." For him a political movement that embodies truth, as he believed the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War did, serves the highest purposes of art through its expression in poetry. Spender believed at the time that ideally a poet could awaken the public consciousness and, by shedding light on a true, moral system of values, could perhaps influence the course of history--in this case, away from Fascism.

Almost forty years later Spender mourned the tragic isolation and frustration of the American poet working in a society too large and diffuse to communicate with effectively, a society where the voice of the poet has become irrelevant. In Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities, an account of the evolving relations between English and American literary and cultural life during the twentieth century, Spender tells of a poets' conference he attended at Harvard during the early '50s. To a full auditorium, Randall Jarrell lamented the obscurity of poets in modern society. Spender, as a foreigner and member of the audience, wondered why Jarrell chose to address this complaint to an adoring crowd. Gradually he realized that Jarrell was attacking elitism:

One of the oldest, deepest, and most nearly conclusive attractions of democracy is manifested in our feeling that....bread and justice, education and art, will be accessible to everyone.

Spender claims that the conflict between this democratic ideal and the fact of the poet's insignificance and irrelevance in American society leaves him relatively impotent and foiled. "The authorities," he writes, "provide American writers with honor, money, flattery. The one thing they do not do is take their work seriously, because literature is not an influence within the area of public consideration and policy." The poet is left to communicate only with those who already agree.

For better or for worse, Spender realized early on "that the poet is, amongst other things, a man who has to have another job, tired, overburdened, who cannot live on his poetry and who is in danger of clinging to it out of self-esteem." For almost half a century he has been as consistently prolific a critic and commentator as he has been a poet. The range of his non-poetic work embraces a Communist polemic, Forward From Liberalism, that was chosen in 1936 as the book of the month by the British Left Book Club, as well as an account in The God that Failed of his subsequent disillusionment with the Party. He has written a wide variety of books and articles on poetry, art and criticism and has spent much of the last thirty years in the United States, teaching, lecturing and observing.

In his own life, Spender has pursued an ideal outlined long ago in World Within World. "The writer's life," he wrote, "should be one of entering into external things and then withdrawing himself from them. Without entering in, he lacks experience of the world; and if he cannot withdraw, he is carried away on the impulse of literary politics, success and the literary career.