Spender (2) ‘To will this Time’s change’

Abstract

‘They were extremely non-political with half of themselves and extremely political with the other half’ (‘Background to the Thirties’, in The Thirties and After, p. 18). Is Spender’s judgement about the poets of the thirties relevant to his own work? This chapter attempts an answer; it begins by considering some of the more overtly political or programmatic pieces in Poems, 1933; it then briefly discusses Vienna (a long poem about the suppression of the Austrian socialist uprising in February 1934, the year the poem was published) and Trial of a Judge (a poetic drama published in 1938); finally, it looks at The Still Centre (Spender’s last collection of the decade, published in 1939). Among other things, this last collection contains Spender’s most important poems about the Spanish Civil War, poems considered in Chapter 8.