Quote

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.

Stephen Spender

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Stephen Spender
Age: 86 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 28
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Stephen Harold Spender
Ends
Confusion
Writing
Mental
Relation
Imposture
Youth
Journalistic
Struggle
Valley
Middle
Struggling
Public
Valleys
Age
Relations

More quotes by Stephen Spender

Image
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
Image
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
Image
So i learned both to accept myself and to aim beyond myself
Stephen Spender
Image
For I had expected always Some brightness to hold in trust, Some final innocence To save from dust
Stephen Spender
Image
In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic, They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring And only measuring Time , like the blank clock. No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament To make them birds upon my singing tree: Time merely drives these lives which do not live As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.
Stephen Spender
Image
History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
Stephen Spender
Image
The only true hope for civilization-the conviction of the individual that his inner life can affect outward events and that, whether or not he does so he is responsible for them.
Stephen Spender
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Never allow gradually the traffic to smother with noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.
Stephen Spender
Image
Cult: simply an extension of the idea that everyone's supreme aim in life is self- fulfillment and happiness and that one is entitled to wreck marriage, children and certainly one's health and sanity in pursuit of this.
Stephen Spender
Image
What is precious is never to forget, The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs, Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light, Nor its grave evening demand for love Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother, With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.
Stephen Spender
Image
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
Image
A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.
Stephen Spender
Image
When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
Stephen Spender
Image
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
Image
But reading is not idleness?it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.
Stephen Spender
Image
Poetry cannot take sides except with life.
Stephen Spender
Image
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Stephen Spender