Quote

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

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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
Eye
Landscape
Herds
Woman
Drive
Tower
Moving
Clouds
Glance
Like
Speed
Glances
England
Limbs
Ravished
Lies
Towers
Horizontal
Eyes
Carrying
Herd
Lying
Beneath
Steadfast

More quotes by 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.
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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.
Stephen Spender
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History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
Stephen Spender
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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.
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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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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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
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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.
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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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
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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.
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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Poetry cannot take sides except with life.
Stephen Spender
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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
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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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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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I think continually of those who were truly great...Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with their honor.
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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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