Stephen Spender

Here is the link to a digital copy of Stephen Spender's Poems Written Abroad.  Sir Stephen Spnder (1909-1995) emerged in the 1930s as one of the new Oxford left-wing poets, along with W. H. Auden, who became his mentor (though he was just two years older).   Spender fought in the Spanish Civil War, an experience that lent authenticity to his poetry about human suffering.  He was prolific as a poet, playwright and literary journalist.  The poems included in this collection were never published. Spender wrote them in 1927, after his father’s death, when he was sent to Nantes and Lausanne, in the hope that a stay abroad would clarify what he wanted to do with himself.    They reflect an early phase of his development, before his crucial encounter with W.H. Auden.  Poems Written Abroad precede by one year Spender’s first, hand-set publication, Nine Experiments (1928), and by two years his Hamburg poems (“Hamburg, 1929,” for example) that he continued to enshrine in his Collected Poems at the end of his life.  The poems range in quality from derivative (“To a Poet”) to attractively bizarre (“The Monk’s Confession”) to quite original (“Clair de Lune”).  They reflect Spender’s reading in French poetry and Edgar Allan Poe, his struggles with his homosexuality, as well as his emerging desire to devote his life to writing, at whatever cost (“Epitaph to a Poet”).

To enlarge, just click on each image.  Please do not share these reproductions with anyone; they are for use in this class only.  And they are not meant to replace your work with the original.  I would like each of you to pick one poem from the collection (or,.in the case of longer poems, such as "The Monk's Confession," a representative section of a poem--about a page), transcribe it and offer your thoughts about it.  Think of explanatory notes you might want to write up for your poem.  If you feel that you're ready to share what you did, post it to the blog:  this could be your first blog post (of the four required ones).