Stephan Spender
(1909–1995)

No poet of the 1930s has provided posterity with a more detailed and honest picture of the era between the wars than has Stephan Spender. Much of his early poetry deals with the world of the 1930s, that "low dishonest decade" that saw the world lurch from depression to fascism to war. Yet Spender, never a pessimist in the manner of T. S. Eliot, celebrates technology at the same time he confronts the problems of industrial civilization.

The son of the political journalist, Spender was born in London and educated at University College, Oxford, where he met and fell under the spell of W. H. Auden. In 1928, while at Oxford, he hand-printed a limited edition of Auden's Poems. Spender contributed his own early poems to Oxford Poetry. He lived in Germany in the early 1930s and published his first important book, Poems, in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich.

Spender, a political activist, traveled to Spain to promote antifascist propaganda during the Spanish Civil War. From 1939 to 1941, he co-edited the literary magazine Horizon and later co-edited the political, cultural, and literary review Encounter. In his autobiography World Within World (1951), Spender is candid and perceptive about people, politics, and himself, as he explores and attempts to integrate his lyrical and idealistic vision with the realities of the society.

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