Quote

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

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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
Break
Cast
Eyes
Casts
Upon
Acts
Flinch
Eye
Opposites
Circumference
Words
Avoid
Obscurity
Light
Refuse
Impatient
Like
Violence
Centre
Path
Shut

More quotes by Stephen Spender

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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.
Stephen Spender
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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.
Stephen Spender
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I think continually of those who were truly great . Who, from the womb, remembered the soul 's history Through corridors of light where the hours are suns , Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire , Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song .
Stephen Spender
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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.
Stephen Spender
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What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent.
Stephen Spender
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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
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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
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When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
Stephen Spender
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I think 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.
Stephen Spender
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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.
Stephen Spender
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There is a certain justice in criticism.
Stephen Spender
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If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.
Stephen Spender
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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
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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
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History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
Stephen Spender
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If you get to a certain age, all people want to know about you is people you knew. ...An American student once said to me, you know, isn't it extraordinary that I am alive and you're not dead.
Stephen Spender
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The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.
Stephen Spender
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I think continually of those who were truly great.
Stephen Spender
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For I had expected always Some brightness to hold in trust, Some final innocence To save from dust
Stephen Spender
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Religion stands, the Church blocking the sun.
Stephen Spender