Spender, Stephen : Stephen Harold (1909-95), English poet & critic, his poems expressed the politically conscience-stricken leftist “new writing” of that period.
... think it worth while to make the underlying meaning of the whole as clear and powerfully precise as are in themselves these phrases. 15 September 1932 Page 435 Stephen Spender Here is a poem by Stephen Spender, one of the most promising of the young modernist poets, in The New Statesman and Nation of November 4, 1933: Perhaps the explosion of a bomb the submarine—a burst ...
... touched by it. I cannot pronounce anything definite on the line you have quoted from Rilke: Da stieg ein Baum, O reine Ubersteigung, for I am almost at sea in German. What Stephen Spender seems to have tried by his translation which you quote from memory - A tree arose, O pure transcension - is to get a polysyllable word at the end in English to match the original's... would go beyond Spender's sense sufficiently to catch yours without straining the general usage? I agree that non-Latin words would be best in rendering Rilke, for a German polysyllable is quite likely to be concrete in its evocation and Page 208 need not be echoed by a similar vocable in English from a Latin origin which would lack concreteness. If I may take Spender as a point de ...
... a perception of the supra-rational and a tendency to concretise, to objectivise, so to say, inner, states or spiritual experiences. Among these poets may be counted C.Day Lewis, George Barker, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Peter Yeats, Walter Alien, Edith Sitwell, David Gascoyne, J.A.Chadwic alias Arjava, K.D.Sethna, Sigfried Sasson, Herbert Read, to give only a few names out of the many. Of these... integral spirit climbs The dark in light for ever". Live you by love confined The spirit even though surrounded by darkness ascends to the heights of inner life "in light for ever". Stephen Spender also gives us remarkable touches of this in- ward subjective turn and of his perception of the worlds that are subliminal. Dissatisfied with the present European civilisation and condemning it... till we come to grasp the symbolism used by the poet,—the two rocks symbolising time and space, which accompany all operations of human mind. Over and above the use of such symbolism, Auden, like Spender, has the sense of the occult and subliminal levels of being and a perception of their influence on man. In his "In Memorium Ernst Toller" which is a war-poem, he mourns the death of Ernst and feels ...
... balance, a reasoned meaning when scanned as quantitative free verse. We find this in passages of The Waste Land and The Hollow Men , e.g., Page 350 Or let us take a passage from Stephen Spender,— There is a rhythm there, but it is not sufficiently gathered up or vivid and it is much more subdued than Eliot's towards the atony and flatness of ordinary prose rhythm. The last lines ...
... Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo , partly to refute another critic, Buddhadeva Bose. In The Concise Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, edited by Stephen Page 431 Spender and Donald Hall (1963), Bose levelled in effect the charge of roodessness, incompetence and mediocrity against the sort of work Mr. Lal favours and practises. Bose's thesis was: "the... Time and the rustle of Nature. "Elsewhere there are many pleasant lines of a derivative nature and it is interesting to find traces of the influence of that Yellow Book character, the poet Stephen Phillips, who was at Cambridge with Sri Aurobindo. The Tennysonian influence is stronger: * First published in Mother India, September 3, 1949, except for the change of a few quotations in... influence is the strongest—especially from the Idylls of the King— strikes one as too sweeping. There is an audacious Elizabethan temper in this blank verse, and Milton, Keats, Arnold and the finest of Stephen Phillips are there as general influences much more than Tennyson. 1 Least of all is the mood or the manner of the Idylls dominant. The early Tennyson had great lyrical and descriptive power, but ...
... English: An Anthology and a Credo, partly Page 142 to refute another critic, Buddhadeva Bose. In The Concise Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, edited by Stephen Spender and Donald Hall (1963), Bose levelled in effect the charge of rootlessness, incompetence and mediocrity against the sort of work Mr. Lal favours and practises. Bose's thesis was: "the best of... in my book. Page 121 "Elsewhere there are many pleasant lines of a derivative nature and it is interesting to find traces of the influence of that Yellow Book character, the poet Stephen Phillips, who was at Cambridge with Sri Aurobindo. The Tennysonian influence is stronger: And lightning 'twixt the eyes intolerable Like heaven's vast eagle all that blackness swept ...
... time. All poetry imposes a new space and time on our world, mixing "unknown modes of being" with things that are familiar: that is why it is full of magic and mystery. Even a subtle fancy like Stephen Spender's Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer, Drinker of horizon's fluid line suggests a strange entity living in an uncommon world interpenetrating and exceeding the outward physical and ...
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