Stephen Spender Quotes

His name never appeared in the papers. The world maintained its traditional wall Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well, Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.

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.

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

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.

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.

Death to the killers, bringing light to life.

I wear your kiss like a feather Laid upon my cheek

The laurelled exiles, kneeling to kiss these sands. Number there freedom's friends. One who Within the element of endless summer, Like leaf in amber, petrified by light, Studied the root of action. One in a garret Read books as though he broke up flints.

One, a poet, went babbling like a fountain Through parks. All were jokes to children. All had the pale unshaven stare of shuttered plants Exposed to a too violent sun.

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

I simply had to get there.

There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.

After the first powerful plain manifesto The black statement of pistons, without more fuss But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.

Of course, the entire effort is to put myself Outside the ordinary range Of what are called statistics. A hundred are killed In the outer suburbs. Well, well, I carry on.

I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.