Spender was one of his generation's most celebrated poets, a writer living at the intersection of literature and politics in Europe between the two world wars. His portrait of his friends—Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Christopher Isherwood—render a romantic world of literary genius. Spender uses a poet's language to create an honest and tender exploration of amity and the many possibilities of love. First published in 1951, World Within World simultaneously shocked and bedazzled the literary establishment for its frank discussion of Eros in the modern world. Out of print for several years, this Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the critic John Bayley and an Afterword that Spender wrote in 1994 describing his reaction to the charges that David Leavitt plagiarized this autobiography in a novel.
Author
Sir Stephen Harold Spender (1909–1995), English poet, translator, literary critic and editor, was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford, where he first became associated with such other outspoken British literary figures as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice. His book The Thirties and After (1979) recalls these figures and others prominent in the arts and politics and his Journals 1939–1983, published in 1986 and edited by John Goldsmith, are a detailed account of his times and contemporaries. His passionate and lyrical verse, filled with images of the modern industrial world yet intensely personal, is collected in such volumes as Twenty Poems (1930), The Still Centre (1939), Poems of Dedication (1946), Collected Poems, 1928–1985 (1986). World Within World, Stephen Spender's autobiography, contains vivid portraits of Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and many other prominent literary figures. First published in 1951 and still in print, World Within World is recognised as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to come out of the 1930s and 1940s. There can be few better portrayals of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s. The Destructive Element (1935), The Creative Element (1953), The Making of a Poem (1962) and Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities (1974), about literary exchanges between Britain and the United States, contain literary and social criticism. Stephen Spender's other works include short stories, novels such as The Backward Son and the heavily autobiographical The Temple (set in Germany on the 1930s) and translations of the poetry of Lorca, Altolaguerra, Rilke, Hölderlin, Stefan George and Schiller. From 1939 to 1941 he co-edited Horizon magazine with Cyril Connolly and was editor of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1967. Stephen Spender owed his own early recognition and publication as a poet to T. S. Eliot. In turn Spender was always a generous champion of young talent, from his raising a fund for the struggling 19-year-old Dylan Thomas, to a lifelong commitment to helping promote the publication of newcomers. In 1972, with his passionate concern for the rights of banned and silenced writers to free expression, he was the chief founder of Index on Censorship, in response to an appeal on behalf of victimised authors worldwide by the Russian dissident Litvinov.
