Stephen Spender as a poet
Stephen Spender is a poet of the 20th century. Like W. H. Auden, he is interested in the uplift of the masses and has contantly advocated social reform on communist lines. Poems (1933) clearly indicate the same Marxist attitude as that of Auden.
In the poems of this volume we have the vision of a future world from which death, despair and decay have been completely wiped-out. The old world, "Where shapes of death haunt human life", must go and the young comrades must "advance to rebuild....advance to rebel", giging up, "dreams...of heaven after our world."
They must be governed and dominated by "palpable and obvious love of man for man." They must work for a work! in which none would die of hunger and "Man shall be man."
His Romanticism:
At heart, Spender is a romantic poet. His romanticism breaks through even when he is writing on the subjects of everyday-life. He has thrown himself heart and soul into the manifold affairs of humanity but delights to retire within himself and expresses his more individuals of personal feelings.
His poetry represents the daulity of the inner and the outer world, the individual experiences. He is a poet who has been born of keen sensibilities and fertile imagination in an age of barrenness and purposelessness of life. He finds no suitable themes for his poetry in modern life.
He is the first apostle of communism and then of Marxism. This early poetry is inspired with an abiding faith in the future of humanity. The Civil war in Spain and the rise of Hitlerism in Europe further depended this faith of the poet.
His heart bleed to find so much misery and wide-spread unemployment among the young people. He talks of the unemployed me who: Turn their empty pocket out gesture of the poor."
His Optimism:
Spender takes refuge in Utopian idealism which has a close affinity with Shelley and Morris. His early poems are full of optimism and vigour. Like Shelley he dreams of the golden age when humanity will enjoy liberation from misery and suffering. He vocies a note of hope in his early poetry:
"Oh, comrades let not those who follow after,
The beautiful generation that shall spring front our sides
Let them not wonder after the failure of blanks
The failure of cathedrals."
He wrote in mood a recalling Wordsworth on the French revolution.
"Bliss was rt in that dawn to believe, But be young was very heaven."
Spender is an artist of fine sensibilities and considerable technical accomplishment. His work is widely admired today for his lyricism, sensuous imagery, psychological penetration, introspective insight and advocacy of the inherent dignity and nobility of the individual.
His nature verse is characterized by the cadence and music of words. Every word contributes in creating an effect either of sense or sound. Sometimes a reader cannot adjust himself to his mood and manner. A critic observes: "He was the most introspective of the poets of the thirties."
