Due to various physical problems, Spender was not able to fight in the war, but served instead in the London Auxiliary Fire Service. In 1949 he was one of a group of intellectuals, formerly sympathetic to Communism, who contributed essays of disillusionment to The God that Failed. Spender quickly became disenchanted with Communism during the Second World War. However, Spender’s poems of social protest were personal and humanistic in tone, rather than didactic, and informed by a deeply self-questioning mind unsure how “to match poetry to either external events or his own feelings” (Alan Brownjohn) The other main strand in his work at the time were poems in praise of technological progress such as ‘The Pylons’, written as a deliberate challenge to the prevailing rural themes of English poetry. His early volumes of poetry reflect his commitment to the socialist cause, particularly Poems (1933) and Vienna (1934). At that time Spender was, briefly, a member of the Communist Party which asked him to observe and report on the conflict, an experience that affected him profoundly. In the early 30s Spender, like many left-wing idealists of the period, went to Spain to join the International Brigade in the fight against Franco. In 1929 Spender visited Germany with Christopher Isherwood. Despite not finishing his degree, Spender’s years at Oxford were formative, not least in the lifelong friendship he developed with Auden. The two met again at Oxford, part of a left-wing group of poets that also included Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis, an association that gave rise to the collective nickname ‘McSpaunday’, though they were never a movement in any formal sense. Spender was born in London to a journalist father and went to the same public school in Norfolk as W.

Stephen Spender (1909-1995) is most closely associated with the 1930s: much of his best poetry was written during this decade and other important works such as his autobiography, World Within World (1951), his novel The Temple (1988) and some volumes of criticism returned to the central questions it raised about the use of poetry in an age of propaganda and war.

Der Tempel by Stephen Spender