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    Sugam Jain, 12 B, Roll No: 44, Project File English: Stephen Spender

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    1. Stephen Spender was an English poet and novelist born in London in 1909 to a journalist father and painter/poet mother of German Jewish heritage. He attended several schools in England but left without a degree to travel in Europe. 2. Spender was part of the literary group known as the "Auden Group" and was friends with many famous writers of the time like W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and T.S. Eliot. His early poetry expressed social protest and he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936. 3. During the Spanish Civil War, Spender traveled to Spain as a journalist for the Daily Worker but was imprisoned briefly

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    Sugam Jain, 12 B, Roll No: 44, Project File English: Stephen Spender

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    1. Stephen Spender was an English poet and novelist born in London in 1909 to a journalist father and painter/poet mother of German Jewish heritage. He attended several schools in England but left without a degree to travel in Europe. 2. Spender was part of the literary group known as the "Auden Group" and was friends with many famous writers of the time like W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and T.S. Eliot. His early poetry expressed social protest and he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936. 3. During the Spanish Civil War, Spender traveled to Spain as a journalist for the Daily Worker but was imprisoned briefly

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    1. Stephen Spender was an English poet and novelist born in London in 1909 to a journalist father and painter/poet mother of German Jewish heritage. He attended several schools in England but left without a degree to travel in Europe. 2. Spender was part of the literary group known as the "Auden Group" and was friends with many famous writers of the time like W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and T.S. Eliot. His early poetry expressed social protest and he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936. 3. During the Spanish Civil War, Spender traveled to Spain as a journalist for the Daily Worker but was imprisoned briefly

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    45 views6 pages

    Sugam Jain, 12 B, Roll No: 44, Project File English: Stephen Spender

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    sugam jain
    1. Stephen Spender was an English poet and novelist born in London in 1909 to a journalist father and painter/poet mother of German Jewish heritage. He attended several schools in England but left without a degree to travel in Europe. 2. Spender was part of the literary group known as the "Auden Group" and was friends with many famous writers of the time like W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and T.S. Eliot. His early poetry expressed social protest and he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936. 3. During the Spanish Civil War, Spender traveled to Spain as a journalist for the Daily Worker but was imprisoned briefly

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    SUGAM JAIN, 12 B,ROLLTH

    NO: 44 ,PROJECT FILE


    ENGLISH
    STEPHEN SPENDER
    Early life
    • Spender was born in Kensington, London, to journalist Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a
    painter and poet, of German Jewish heritage.[1][2] He went first to Hall School in Hampstead and then at 13
    to Gresham's School, Holt and later Charlecote School in Worthing, but he was unhappy there. On the
    death of his mother, he was transferred to University College School (Hampstead), which he later
    described as "that gentlest of schools".[3] Spender left for Nantes and Lausanne and then went up to 
    University College, Oxford (much later, in 1973, he was made an honorary fellow). Spender said at
    various times throughout his life that he never passed any exam. Perhaps his closest friend and the man
    who had the biggest influence on him was W. H. Auden, who introduced him to Christopher Isherwood.
    Spender handprinted the earliest version of Auden's Poems. He left Oxford without taking a degree and in
    1929 moved to Hamburg. Isherwood invited him to Berlin. Every six months, Spender went back to
    England.
    • Spender was acquainted with fellow Auden Group members Louis MacNeice, Edward Upward and 
    Cecil Day-Lewis. He was friendly with David Jones and later came to know William Butler Yeats, 
    Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, 
    Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley, F. T. Prince and 
    T. S. Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, particularly Virginia Woolf.
    Career
    • Spender began work on a novel in 1929, which was not published until 1988, under the title The Temple. The novel is about a young man who travels to Germany and finds a
    culture at once more open than England's, particularly about relationships between men, and shows frightening harbingers of Nazism that are confusingly related to the very
    openness the man admires. Spender wrote in his 1988 introduction: In the late Twenties young English writers were more concerned with censorship than with
    politics.... 1929 was the last year of that strange Indian Summer—the Weimar Republic. For many of my friends and for myself, Germany seemed a paradise
    where there was no censorship and young Germans enjoyed extraordinary freedom in their lives[4] Spender was discovered by T.S. Eliot, an editor at Faber & Faber, in
    1933.[5] His early poetry, notably Poems (1933), was often inspired by social protest. Living in Vienna, he further expressed his convictions in Forward from Liberalism; in
    Vienna (1934), a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Austrian socialists; and in Trial of a Judge[6] (1938), an antifascist drama in verse. At the Shakespeare and
    Company bookstore in Paris, which published the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, historic figures made rare appearances to read their work: Paul Valéry, André
    • Gide and Eliot. Hemingway even broke his rule of not reading in public if Spender would read with him. Since Spender agreed, Hemingway appeared for a rare reading in
    public with him.[7] In 1936, Spender became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Harry Pollitt, its head, invited him to write for the Daily Worker on the
    Moscow Trials. In late 1936, Spender married Inez Pearn, whom he had recently met at an Aid to Spain meeting.[8][9] She is described as 'small and rather ironic' and
    'strikingly good-looking'. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Daily Worker sent him to Spain on a mission to observe and report on the Soviet ship Komsomol, which
    had sunk while carrying Soviet weapons to the Second Spanish Republic. Spender travelled to Tangier and tried to enter Spain via Cadiz, but was sent back. He then travelled
    to Valencia, where he met Hemingway and Manuel Altolaguirre. (Tony Hyndman, alias Jimmy Younger, had joined the International Brigades, which were fighting against
    Francisco Franco's forces in the Battle of Guadalajara.) In July 1937 he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude
    of intellectuals to the war, held in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid and attended by many writers, including Hemingway, André Malraux, and Pablo Neruda.[10] Pollitt told
    Spender "to go and get killed; we need a Byron in the movement". Spender was imprisoned for a while in Albacete. In Madrid, he met Malraux; they discussed Gide's
    Retour de l'U.R.S.S.. Because of medical problems, he went back to England and bought a house in Lavenham. In 1939, he divorced. His 1938 translations of works by Bertolt
    Brecht and Miguel Hernández appeared in John Lehmann's New Writing.[11] He felt close to the Jewish people; his mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, was half-Jewish (her
    father's family were German Jews who converted to Christianity, and her mother came from an upper-class family of Catholic German, Lutheran Danish and distant Italian
    descent). Spender's second wife, Natasha, whom he married in 1941, was also Jewish. In 1942, he joined the fire brigade of Cricklewood and Maresfield Gardens as a
    volunteer. Spender met several times with the poet Edwin Muir. After he was no longer left-wing, he was one of those who wrote of their disillusionment with communism in
    the essay collection The God that Failed (1949), along with Arthur Koestler and others.[12] It is thought that one of the big areas of disappointment was the Molotov-
    Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, which many leftists saw as a betrayal. Like Auden, Isherwood and several other outspoken opponents of fascism in
    the 1930s, Spender did not see active military service in World War II. He was initially graded "C" upon examination because of his earlier colitis, poor eyesight, varicose
    veins and the long-term effects of a tapeworm in 1934.
    • World of art

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