Stephen Spender Quotes

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.

Since we are what we are, what shall we be But what we are? We are, we have Six feet and seventy years, to see The light, and then resign it for the grave.

There was a wood, Habitation of foxes and fleshy burrows, Where I learnt to uncast my childhood, and not alone, I learnt, not alone. There were four hands, four eyes, A third mouth of the dark to kiss. Two people And a third not either: and both double, yet different. I entered with myself. I left with a woman.

The seen and seeing softly mutually strike Their glass barrier that arrests the sight. But the world's being hides in the volcanoes And the foul history pressed into its core; And to myself my being is my childhood And passion and entrails and the roots of senses; I'm pressed into the inside of a mask At the back of love, the back of air, the back of light.

The important rules in life are to Love and not feel guilty about what form the Love takes. Guilt is Failure to Love, which turns against you and causes Neurosis which, in turn, realises itself as Cancer.

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.

Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer, Drinker of horizon’s fluid line; Ear that suspends on a chord The spirit drinking timelessness; Touch, love, all senses...

Let your ghost follow The young men to the Pole, up Everest, to war: by love, be shot. For the uncreating chaos descends And claims you in marriage: though a man, you were ever a bride:

When you read and understand a poem, then you master chaos a little.

And then the heart in its white sailing pride Launches among the swans and the stretched lights Laid on the water, as on your cheek The other kiss and my listening Life, waiting for all your life to speak.

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.

Both Hopkins and Lawrence were religious not just in the ritualistic sense but in the sense of being obsessed with the word — the word made life and truth — with the need to invent a language as direct as religious utterance. Both were poets, but outside the literary fashions of their time. Both felt that among the poets of their time was an absorption in literary manners, fashions and techniques which separated the line of the writing from that of religious truth. Both felt that the modern situation imposed on them the necessity to express truth by means of a different kind of poetic writing from that used in past or present. Both found themselves driven into writing in a way which their contemporaries did not understand or respond to yet was inevitable to each in his pursuit of truth. Here of course there is a difference between Hopkins and Lawrence, because Hopkins in his art was perhaps over-worried, over-conscientious, whereas Lawrence was an instinctive poet who, in his concern for truth, understood little of the problems of poetic form, although he held strong views about them.

I simply had to get there.

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.

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.