Stephen Spender Quotes

All that you can imagine you already know

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.

When you read and understand a poem, then you master chaos a little.

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

الفتى والفتاة اللذان يتبادلان الغرام على مقعد في حديقة عامة أو في إحدى أزقة الريف لا يعلمان أن هناك برقية تشن طريقها من لندن هذه اللحظة (وتمرُّ خلال جسديهما!) لكي تقرر أن مصير الفتى هو أن يُنزَع من بين أحضان فتاته ويلقى على رمال الصحراء وفي رأسه طلقة نارية, بينما تساهم الفتاة في إنتاج الطلقات النارية في مصنع من المصانع الحربية ..

I think continually of those who were truly great...Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with their honor.

The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards an ideal aim. The idea that a goal can be attained perpetually frustrates human beings, who are disappointed at never getting there, never being able to stop.

...Tolstoy's characters seem to come forward to meet you, very conscious of the impression they are making on one another and on the reader.

Near the snow,near the sun , in the highest field See how those names are feted by the wavering grass, And by the streamers of white cloud, And whispers of wind in the listening sky; The names of those who in their lives have fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre. Born of the sun they traveled a short while towrads the sun. And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother / With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself Outside the ordinary range Of what are called statistics. —STEPHEN SPENDER

أتكلّم عن كل فرد, الحياة في نظره هي الحياة, وليست مجرد حلقة جاثمة لا نهاية لها من القوانين والمخاوف والعبودية والادعاء والبحث عن المراكز واغتصاب المال. لا شك أن كل إنسان قد مر بمثل هذه اللحظات, لحظات يتحرر فيها من ظروف الحاضر ومخاوفه وشروره لكي يحيا ببساطة لأجل الحياة. إن فهم هذه اللحظات هو جوهر الحرية..

Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to. —LETTER FROM GEORGE ORWELL TO STEPHEN SPENDER, APRIL 15, 1938

As I lose myself in the heart of certain children, I have lost myself in the sea many times. Ignorant of the water I go seeking a death full of light to consume me. — Federico García Lorca, from “Gacela De La Huida (Garcela Of The Flight),” The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. Trans. Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili. (New Directions; unknown edition May 17, 2005) Originally published December 3rd 1915.

Twain had it too and Alexander Woollcott. Stephen Spender and Barbara Skelton insisted Cyril Connolly had it, on rare occasions, when the word for it was “magnificent,” but I only heard faint echoes of this gigantic gift. Sir Isaiah Berlin had it, and I heard him: but the trouble was, once he got really going on a line of fantastic humor, he began to speak so fast, and his accent became so impenetrable, that the sense wasdifficult to grasp, though his evident delight in his fun was so furious that you laughed all the same.

To give just one example of what the inside of this world (largely upper-class and Oxbridge world of wealth, power, and privilege) looked like: Huxley sent the UNESCO documents to his close friend the English poet Stephen Spender. In his reply, from his regular retreat at the Chalet Waldegg in Gstaad, Switzerland, Spender says that he won't burden Huxley with his own views on human rights, since he doesn't have anything 'worth saying' on the topic, but then goes on to suggest that Huxley send the documents to some of his acquaintances. This curious list of the great and the good includes the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, the first and second president of Czechoslovakia, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer, and W.H. Auden. Spender even gives Huxley some advice about whom to avoid: 'I honestly don't think there are any outstanding Belgians.

Through man’s love and woman’s love Moons and tides move Which fuse those islands, lying face to face. Mixing in naked passion, Those who naked new life fashion Are themselves reborn in naked grace.

Zelf heb ik Frisch één keer ontmoet, in Edinburgh. Wat weet ik daar nog van? Niet veel. Met Mulisch en Reve was ik de Nederlandse delegatie bij een groot schrijverscongres. 1962. Vier jaar voor hij aan dat dagboek zou beginnen. Hij was niet groot, en had een bril met een zwaar montuur en zoiets als dubbele glazen, waardoor het leek of de ogen vergroot werden. Ik was negenentwintig, en het enige dat er van mij vertaald was kon hij niet gelezen hebben. Maar je bent aanwezig, dus misschien ben je wel wat. Van Harry was toen ook nog niet veel vertaald, maar hij had zijn allure mee, en straalde een onmetelijke zekerheid uit. We stonden met Frisch aan de bar, wat we besproken hebben is vervlogen. Frisch had een behoorlijke slok op, amuseerde zich, en liet ons praten. Harry sneed door een menigte met die neus als een schegbeeld, misschien heeft Frisch dat wel opgeschreven. Ontmoetingen met schrijvers die je niet kunt lezen hebben altijd iets spannends, omdat er niets te bewijzen valt. Henry Miller liep er rond, Angus Wilson, Stephen Spender, Normal Mailer, beroemde Schotten waar wij nog nooit van gehoord hadden, je hoort erbij maar je bent niemand en god weet wat je geschreven hebt in die rare taal van je, en iedereen is vriendelijk. Ik voelde me zoals een van de onnozele kinderen in het voorgeborchte, nog niet gezondigd, wachtend op de hemel die misschien wel een hel is. Eén beeld is me altijd bijgebleven. In een zaal waar al die beroemdheden rondliepen zat een adellijke Schotse familie in kilts met de kleuren en ruiten van hun clan. Ze hadden schoenen met zilveren gespen, en een dolk met een zilveren gevest in een wollen kniekous gestoken. Smokingjasjes op die rokken, een zwartglanzende vlinderdas, ridderordes. Geen ogenblik keken ze op naar de eventuele beroemdheden, al ze die al kenden. Ze zaten daar als atavistische beelden in een feodale oase, werden van achteren bediend door mensen die ze niet aankeken, en waren zichzelf volstrekt genoeg. Het is een halve eeuw geleden en ik weet het nog.

Him I delight in accepts joy as joy; He is richened by sorrow as a river by its bends

As Stephen Spender put it, “Music is the most powerful of all the idealist drugs except religion.

Stephen Spender’s poem “The Truly Great.

Stephen Spender defines the “terrifying challenge of poetry” as the attempt to express in words that which may not be verbally expressed but may be verbally suggested: “Can I think out the logic of images? How easy it is to explain here the poem that I would have liked to write! How difficult it would be to write it. For writing it would imply living my way through the imaged experience of all those ideas, which here are mere abstractions, and such an effort of imaginative experience requires a lifetime of patience and watching.

Stephen Spender spent part of the 1930s living in Berlin and reflected on that time in his diary in 1939. Before the ultimate catastrophe had begun he mulled on the Germans he had met while living there. As he wrote, ‘The trouble with all the nice people I knew in Germany is that they were either tired or weak.’ Why were the nice people so tired? Existential tiredness is not a problem only because it produces a listless type of life. It is a problem because it can allow almost anything to follow in its wake.

[Dylan] Thomas's poetry is turned on like a tap; it is just poetic stuff with no beginning nor end, shape or intelligent and intelligible control

He looked at us coldly / And his eyes were dead and his hands on the oar / Were black with obols and varicose veins / Marbled his calves and he said to us coldly: / If you want to die you will have to pay for it

My philosophy, if you can call it that, is that I am happy because there is no sufficient reason why I should be unhappy.

The important rules in life are to Love and not feel guilty about what form the Love takes. Guilt is Failure to Love, which turns against you and causes Neurosis which, in turn, realises itself as Cancer.

Daybreak" At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel. Her hair a harp, the hand of breeze follows And plays, against the white cloud of the pillows. Then, in a flush of rose, she woke, and here eyes that opened Swam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned. ‘My dream becomes my dream,’ she said, ‘come true. I waken from you to my dream of you.’ Oh, my own wakened dream then dared assume The audacity of her sleep. Our dreams Poured into each other’s arms, like streams.

At these best moments a great humility fused with a great ambition: to be only what I was, but to the utmost of what I was.