Stephen
Spender, the son of a journalist, was
born in London in 1909. He was educated
at University College, Oxford,
where he met W. H. Auden.
Spender left university without taking a degree and went to Berlin
in 1930. Poems appeared in 1933.
Spender
took a keen interest in politics and declared himself to be a socialist
and pacifist.
In 1937 he went with the International
Brigades to the Spanish
Civil War. Harry
Pollitt, head of the Communist
Party,
told Spender "to go and get killed; we need a Byron in the movement."
Spender relived his
experiences of the war in Poems from Spain
(1939) and Runes and Visions (1941).
In 1941 Spender married
the pianist Natasha Litvin. During
the Second World War he enlisted in the London
Fire Service. Spender
also co-edited Horizon (1939-41)
with Cyril
Connolly and later
edited Encounter (1953-66).
After the war, Spender
joined Unesco as a globe-trotting cultural emissary. He also worked
for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for International PEN, and
the British Council.
Books
by Spender include Poems of Dedication
(1947), The Edge of Being (1949),
an autobiography, World Within World
(1951), The Creative Element (1953),
The Struggle of the Modern (1963),
The Generous Days (1969) and
Love-Hate Relations (1974).
In
1970 Spender became Professor of English at University College in
London,
a post he held for seven years. Stephen
Spender died
in 1995.
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