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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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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
Running
Bodies
Blotted
Body
Skins
Mutilated
Destroyed
Peeling
Rain
Hurricane
Tears
Victorious
Streets
Posters
Wall
Hurricanes
Words
Walls
Leaflets

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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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There is a certain justice in criticism.
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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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If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
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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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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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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.
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So i learned both to accept myself and to aim beyond myself
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Poetry cannot take sides except with life.
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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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Religion stands, the Church blocking the sun.
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For I had expected always Some brightness to hold in trust, Some final innocence To save from dust
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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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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.
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