Stephen Spender: Trending quotes

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Stephen Spender: 152 quotes1 like

“I wear your kiss like a feather
Laid upon my cheek”

"Two Kisses"
The Still Centre (1939)

“Death is another milestone on their way.
With laughter on their lips and with winds blowing round them
They record simply
How this one excelled all others in making driving belts.”

Stephen Spender

"The Funeral" (l. 1–4)

“All have become so nervous and so cold
That each man hates the cause and distant words
Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets.”

Stephen Spender

"Two Armies"
The Still Centre (1939)

“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

On turning 70 in Journals 1939-83 (1986), as quoted by R Z Sheppard in TIMEmagazine (20 January 1986)

“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

On his father in "The Public Son of a Public Man" as quoted in TIMEmagazine (20 January 1986) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1074981,00.html

“Deep in the winter plain, two armies
Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.”

Stephen Spender

"Two Armies"
The Still Centre (1939)

“Involved in my own entrails and a crust
Turning a pitted surface towards a space,
I am a world that watches through a sky
And is persuaded by mirrors
To regard its being as an external shell,
One of a universe of stars and faces.”

Stephen Spender

"The Mask"
The Still Centre (1939)

“Here where I lie is the hot pit
Crowding on the mind with coal
And the will turned against it
Only drills new seams of darkness
Through the dark-surrounding whole.
Our vivid suns of happiness
Withered from summer, drop their flowers;
Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow
Fold on the hands of yesterday
In double sorrow.”

Stephen Spender

"The Separation"
The Still Centre (1939)

“Whatever happens, I shall never be alone,
I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.”

Stephen Spender

'The Uncreating Chaos" — This poem was originally published in Poems (1933) where it reads: Whatever happens, I shall never be alone.
I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution.
The Still Centre (1939)

“Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words — that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canvas or chisels into stone or notes of music — those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. “Close analysis” is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism.”

Stephen Spender

"Tradition-Bound Literature and Traditionless Painting"
The Struggle of the Modern (1963)

“More beautiful and soft than any moth
With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path
Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines
Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall
To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls,
Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.”

Stephen Spender

"The Landscape near an Aerodrome"
Poems (1933)

“I say, stamping the words with emphasis,
Drink from here energy and only energy”

Stephen Spender

"Not Palaces" (l. 8–9).

“Our single purpose was to walk through snow
With faces swung to their prodigious North
Like compass iron.”

Stephen Spender

"Polar Exploration"
The Still Centre (1939)