Stephen Spender quotes

Stephen Spender was an English poet, novelist, and essayist, celebrated for his works on social injustice and political themes. A key figure of the 1930s literary generation, he was associated with writers such as W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. He contributed greatly to modern literature through his poetry, criticism, and international cultural involvement. Here are 93 of his quotes:

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

Stephen Spender

When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes, I was your son, high on your horse, My mind a top whipped by the lashes Of your rhetoric, windy of course.

Stephen Spender

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Stephen Spender

Religion stands, the Church blocking the sun.

Stephen Spender

For I had expected always Some brightness to hold in trust, Some final innocence To save from dust.

Stephen Spender

Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds Where the soul rests, proclaims eternity. But let the wrong cry out as raw as wounds This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.

Stephen Spender

The iron arc of the avoiding journey Curves back upon my weakness at the end; Whether the faint light spark against my face Or in the dark my sight hide from my sight, Centre and circumference are both my weakness.

Stephen Spender

My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre.

Stephen Spender

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.

Stephen Spender

Deep in the winter plain, two armies Dig their machinery, to destroy each other. Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave On either side, except the dead, and wounded.

Stephen Spender

Involved in my own entrails and a crust Turning a pitted surface towards a space, I am a world that watches through a sky And is persuaded by mirrors To regard its being as an external shell, One of a universe of stars and faces.

Stephen Spender

Death to the killers, bringing light to life.

Stephen Spender

All the posters on the walls All the leaflets in the streets Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain, Their words blotted out with tears, Skins peeling from their bodies In the victorious hurricane.

Stephen Spender

My single pair of eyes Contain the universe they see; Their mirrored multiplicity Is packed into a hollow body Where I reflect the many, in my one.

Stephen Spender

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.

Stephen Spender

No one Shall hunger: Man shall spend equally. Our goal which we compel: Man shall be man.

Stephen Spender

Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell Reaching across the landscape of hysteria, To where larger than all the charcoaled batteries And imaged towers against that dying sky, Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.

Stephen Spender

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Stephen Spender

What I had not foreseen Was the gradual day Weakening the will Leaking the brightness away.

Stephen Spender

Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness.

Stephen Spender

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.

Stephen Spender

I say, stamping the words with emphasis, Drink from here energy and only energy.

Stephen Spender