Stephen Spender Quotes

Quotes about:

• One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.

  Stephen Spender

  Different, Genius, Way

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• History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

  Stephen Spender

  Memories, History, Ships

  "Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Times" by Laurence J. Peter, (p. 247), 1993.

  27 Copy quote

• Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

  Stephen Spender

  Poetry, Great Poet, Can Do

  The New York Times, March 26, 1961.

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• So i learned both to accept myself and to aim beyond myself

  Stephen Spender

  Accepting, Aim

  Stephen Spender (1966). “World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender”, p.314, Univ of California Press

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• All that you can imagine you already know.

  Stephen Spender

  Imagination, Imagine, Knows

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• Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.

  Stephen Spender

  Ambition, Vanity, Ambitious

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• What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent.

  Stephen Spender

  Writing, Voice, Luxury

  Stephen Spender (1978). “The thirties and after: poetry, politics, people 1933-1970”, Random House Inc

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• But reading is not idleness?it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.

  Stephen Spender

  Reading, Civilization, Creative

  1980 Journal entry, 4 Jan.

  20 Copy quote

• I think of those who were truly great. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

  Stephen Spender

  Life, Courage, Heart

  Stephen Spender (2015). “Selected Poems of Stephen Spender”, p.23, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Eye, Body, Pairs

  Stephen Spender (2015). “New Collected Poems of Stephen Spender”, p.173, Faber & Faber

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• I think continually of those who were truly great.

  Stephen Spender

  Thinking, Corridors

  1933 'I Think Continually of Those'.

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• There is a certain justice in criticism.

  Stephen Spender

  Justice, Criticism, Certain

  Stephen Spencer's lecture at Brooklyn College, as quoted in "The New York Times", November 20, 1984.

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• Sometimes when I am writing, I am aware of a rhythm, a dance, a fury, which is as yet empty of words.

  Stephen Spender

  Writing, Sometimes, Empty

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• 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.

  Stephen Spender

  Ideas, Goal, Able

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• When I saw photographs of children murdered by the Fascist, I felt furious pity. When the supporters of Franco talked of Red atrocities, I merely felt indignant that people should tell such lies. In the first case I saw corpses, in the second only words. . . I gradually acquired a certain horror of the way in which my own mind worked. It was clear to me that unless I cared about every murdered child impartially, I did not really care about children being murdered at all.

  Stephen Spender

  Children, Lying, People

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• The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

  Stephen Spender

  Memories, Creativity, Self

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

  Stephen Spender

  Hope, Dust, Finals

  1933 'What I Expected, Was'.

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

  Stephen Spender

  Fog, Noise, Spirit

  Stephen Spender (2015). “Selected Poems of Stephen Spender”, p.23, Faber & Faber

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• A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.

  Stephen Spender

  Inspiration, Writing, People

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• Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again as though with all their original freshness.

  Stephen Spender

  Memories, Poetry, Genius

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

  Stephen Spender

  Revolution, Affair, Whatever Happens

  "The Still Centre (The Uncreating Chaos)". Book by Stephen Spender, 1939.

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• Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

  Stephen Spender

  One Line, Lines, Speak

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• In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic, They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring And only measuring Time , like the blank clock. No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament To make them birds upon my singing tree: Time merely drives these lives which do not live As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.

  Stephen Spender

  Eye, Bird, Tree

  Stephen Spender (2015). “New Collected Poems of Stephen Spender”, p.50, Faber & Faber

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• All one can do is to achieve nakedness, to be what one is with all one's faculties and perceptions, strengthened by all the skill which one can acquire. And then to stand before the judgement of time.

  Stephen Spender

  Skills, Achievement, Judgement

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• Poetry cannot take sides except with life.

  Stephen Spender

  Sides

  1942 Life and the Poet.

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