Stephen Spender Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.

Stephen Spender
Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell
Reaching across the landscape of hysteria,
To where larger than all the charcoaled batteries
And imaged towers against that dying sky,
Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.

Stephen Spender
When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,
I was your son, high on your horse,
My mind a top whipped by the lashes
Of your rhetoric, windy of course.

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

Stephen Spender
A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.
Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something felt is true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience.

Stephen Spender
Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon's fluid line;
Ear that suspends on a chord
The spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses...

Stephen Spender
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret.

Stephen Spender
I think continually of those who were truly great... The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's center. Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Stephen Spender
You drive the landscape like a herd of clouds
Moving against your horizontal tower
Of steadfast speed.
All England lies beneath you like a woman
With limbs ravished
By one glance carrying all these eyes.

Stephen Spender
What the eye delights in, no longer dictates
My greed to enjoy: boys, grass, the fenced-off
deer.
It leaves those figures that distantly play
On the horizon's rim: they sign their peace, in games.

Stephen Spender
My uncle was famous for his balanced point of view. At the time of which I am writing (when he was nearly seventy) it had become so balanced, that the act of balancing seemed rather automatic.One had only to offer him an opinion for him to balance it with a counter- opinion of exactly the same weight, as a grocer puts a pound weight against a pound of sugar.

Stephen Spender
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
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
After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.

Stephen Spender
My brothers and sister and I were brought up in an atmosphere which I would describe as 'Puritan decadence'. Puritanism names the behaviour which is condemned; Puritan decadence regards the name itself as indecent, and pretends that the object behind that name does not exist until it is named.

Stephen Spender
Bright clasp of her whole hand around my finger My daughter as we walk together now. All my life I'll feel a ring invisibly Circle this bone with shining When she is grown.

Stephen Spender
Under the olive trees, from the ground
Grows this flower, which is a wound.
It is easier to ignore
Than the heroes' sunset fire
Of death plunged in their willed desire
Raging with flags on the world's shore.

Stephen Spender
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
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
Let your ghost follow
The young men to the Pole, up Everest, to war: by
love, be shot.
For the uncreating chaos descends
And claims you in marriage: though a man, you were
ever a bride

Stephen Spender
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
All have become so nervous and so cold
That each man hates the cause and distant words
Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets.

Stephen Spender
History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Stephen Spender
History has tongues
Has angels has guns — has saved has praised —
Today proclaims
Achievements of her exiles long returned
Now no more rootless, for whom her printed page
Glazes their bruised waste years in one
Balancing present sky.

Stephen Spender
No One
Shall Hunger: Man shall spend equally.
Our Goal Which We Compel: Man shall be man.

Stephen Spender
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
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
One, a poet, went babbling like a fountain
Through parks. All were jokes to children.
All had the pale unshaven stare of shuttered plants
Exposed to a too violent sun.

Stephen Spender
Extensive whiteness drowned
All sense of space. We tramped through
Static, glaring days, Time's suspended blank.

Stephen Spender
Deep in the winter plain, two armies
Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.

Stephen Spender