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Stephen Spender

73 quotes

“Your quicksilver declaiming eye Had frozen to the stare of a straight line Which only saw goals painted in its beam And made an artificial darkness all around Which thickened into Allies.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) first seen 1814 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Napoleon In 1814
“To break out of the chaos of my darkness Into a lucid day is all my will. My words like eyes in night, stare to reach A centre for their light: and my acts thrown To distant places by impatient violence Yet lock together to mould a path of stone Out of my darkness into a lucid day.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The iron arc of the avoiding journey Curves back upon my weakness at the end; Whether the faint light spark against my face Or in the dark my sight hide from my sight, Centre and circumference are both my weakness.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My single pair of eyes Contain the universe they see; Their mirrored multiplicity Is packed into a hollow body Where I reflect the many, in my one.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And if this I were destroyed, The image shattered, My perceived, rent world would fly In an explosion of final judgement To the ends of the sky, The colour in the iris of the eye. Opening, my eyes say 'Let there be light', Closing, they shut me in a coffin.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here where I lie is the hot pit Crowding on the mind with coal And the will turned against it Only drills new seams of darkness Through the dark-surrounding whole. Our vivid suns of happiness Withered from summer, drop their flowers; Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow Fold on the hands of yesterday In double sorrow.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wear your kiss like a feather Laid upon my cheek”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And then the heart in its white sailing pride Launches among the swans and the stretched lights Laid on the water, as on your cheek The other kiss and my listening Life, waiting for all your life to speak.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Involved in my own entrails and a crust Turning a pitted surface towards a space, I am a world that watches through a sky And is persuaded by mirrors To regard its being as an external shell, One of a universe of stars and faces.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The seen and seeing softly mutually strike Their glass barrier that arrests the sight. But the world's being hides in the volcanoes And the foul history pressed into its core; And to myself my being is my childhood And passion and entrails and the roots of senses; I'm pressed into the inside of a mask At the back of love, the back of air, the back of light.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You stared out of the window on the emptiness Of a world exploding: Stones and rubble thrown upwards in a fountain Blasted sideways by the wind. Every sensation except loneliness Was drained out of your mind By the lack of any motionless object the eye could find. You were a child again Who sees for the first time things happen.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you smiled, Everything in the room was shattered; Only you remained whole In frozen wonder, as though you stared At your image in the broken mirror Where it had always been silverly carried.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the posters on the walls All the leaflets in the streets Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain, Their words blotted out with tears, Skins peeling from their bodies In the victorious hurricane.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the lessons learned, unlearned; The young, who learned to read, now blind Their eyes with an archaic film; The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune Following the donkey`s bray; These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses On the high door of a skull and in some corner Of an irrefrangible eye Some old man memory jumps to a child — Spark from the days of energy. And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum" in Modern British Poetry (1962) edited by Louis Untermeyer (1962) variant : Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor.
“Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal — For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. All of their time and space are foggy slum. So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor, This map becomes their window and these windows That shut upon their lives like catacombs, Break O break open 'till they break the town And show the children green fields and make their world Run azure on gold sands and let their tongues Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open History is theirs whose language is the sun.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The prose method might be described as that where the writer provides a complete description of all those material factors in the environment which condition his characters. The poetic method sees the centre of consciousness as the point where all that is significant in the surrounding world becomes aware and transformed; the prose method requires a description of that world in order to explain the characteristics of the people in it. The hero of the poetic method is Rimbaud; of the prose method, Balzac.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism... The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am for neither West nor East, but for myself considered as a self — one of the millions who inhabit the earth... If it seems absurd that an individual should set up as a judge between these vast powers, armed with their superhuman instruments of destruction I can reply that the very immensity of the means to destroy proves that judging and being judged does not lie in these forces. For supposing that they achieved their utmost and destroyed our civilization, whoever survived would judge them by a few statements. a few poems, a few témoignages [testimonies] surviving from all the ruins, a few words of those men who saw outside and beyond the means which were used and all the arguments which were marshaled in the service of those means. Thus I could not escape from myself into some social situation of which my existence was a mere product, and my witnessing a willfully distorting instrument. I had to be myself, choose and not be chosen... But to believe that my individual freedom could gain strength from my seeking to identify myself with the "progressive" forces was different from believing that my life must be an instrument of means decided on by political leaders. I came to see that within the struggle for a juster world, there is a further struggle between the individual who cares for long-term values and those who are willing to use any and every means to gain immediate political ends — even good ends. Within even a good social cause, there is a duty to fight for the pre-eminence of individual conscience. The public is necessary, but the private must not be abolished by it; and the individual must not be swallowed up by the concept of the social man.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words — that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canvas or chisels into stone or notes of music — those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. “Close analysis” is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Both Hopkins and Lawrence were religious not just in the ritualistic sense but in the sense of being obsessed with the word — the word made life and truth — with the need to invent a language as direct as religious utterance. Both were poets, but outside the literary fashions of their time. Both felt that among the poets of their time was an absorption in literary manners, fashions and techniques which separated the line of the writing from that of religious truth. Both felt that the modern situation imposed on them the necessity to express truth by means of a different kind of poetic writing from that used in past or present. Both found themselves driven into writing in a way which their contemporaries did not understand or respond to yet was inevitable to each in his pursuit of truth. Here of course there is a difference between Hopkins and Lawrence, because Hopkins in his art was perhaps over-worried, over-conscientious, whereas Lawrence was an instinctive poet who, in his concern for truth, understood little of the problems of poetic form, although he held strong views about them.”
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source