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One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.

Stephen Spender

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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
Complete
Different
Thus
Plodding
Way
Works
Mozart
Genius
Beethoven
Type
Completed
Achieve
Stages
Stage
Immediate
Ways
Concentration

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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.
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Poetry cannot take sides except with life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.
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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.
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History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
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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.
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When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
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Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds, Where the soul rests, proclaims eternity. But let the wrong cry out as raw as wounds, This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.
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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.
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I think continually of those who were truly great.
Stephen Spender
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Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
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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.
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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.
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Religion stands, the Church blocking the sun.
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The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards an ideal aim. The idea that a goal can be attained perpetually frustrates human beings, who are disappointed at never getting there, never being able to stop.
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There is a certain justice in criticism.
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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.
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