Word: spender
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...