Spender (1) ‘The sense of falling light’

Abstract

Anyone who wishes to make substantial claims for the poetry which Stephen Spender wrote in the 1930s confronts a widespread misconception and a practical problem. The misconception is the view of the poems as little more than footnotes to an unusually interesting literary life. Spender himself has partly, if inadvertently, encouraged this view, describing himself as ‘an autobiographer restlessly searching for forms in which to express the stages of my development’ (WWW, p. 138). But both his autobiography, World Within World (1951), and his critical study, The Destructive Element (1935), explore issues which preoccupy Spender as a practising poet. Unfortunately, the clarity and candour of Spender’s prose have distracted attention from his more demanding poetry: poetry such as that contained in Poems (1933; second edition 1934) on which this chapter will concentrate.