'From 1931 onwards,' Stephen Spender wrote, 'in common with many other people, I felt hounded by external events.' The date is not an arbitrary one: 1931 was the watershed between the post-war years and the pre-war years, the point at which the mood of the 'thirties first became generally apparent. (p. 65) [By] 1931 many people in England certainly had begun to see the crisis in which they lived as more than a temporary economic reverse—to see it rather as the colla...

[In the following interview, which was conducted on February 14, 1978 and later edited for inclusion in Partisan Review, Spender discusses his relationship with W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and other literary figures, and remarks on his career as a poet, critic, and teacher.]

[Timms is an English educator and critic. In the following review, he discusses Spender's novel The Temple, and suggests that there exists a "dialectic between cultural decorum and artistic innovation."]

[Pace is an American journalist. In the obituary below, he surveys Spender's life and career.]

[In the obituary below, the critic surveys Spender's life and career.]

[Symons is an English novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, and biographer. In the review below, he comments on the poetry collection Dolphins and commends Spender's lifelong dedication to critical self-evaluation.]

[Parker is an English nonfiction writer and biographer. In the following tribute, he remarks on Spender's character.]

[In the following review, Perkins comments favorably on The Temple and argues that its message regarding the repression of cultural and sexual freedom is relevant to contemporary America.]

It was Spender's Poems, 1933, which first made the general public aware that there was a new poetic generation born, and we can tell this from the fact that the popular press, borrowing a word from one of his poems, attached to the group the soubriquet 'The Pylon Poets'…. [It] was important, and particularly important (and deleterious) to Spender himself. He could have handled easily enough, with his habit of laughing at himself, the more vulgar role of spokesman for the group in...

In his poem "Judas Iscariot," Stephen Spender depicts Judas's betrayal of Christ as an act of defiant individualism, and he further proposes that perhaps Christ betrayed Judas. These unusual arguments, however, are not without precedent in twentieth-century literature, and there exists considerable evidence to suggest that Spender adapted to his own poetic purposes ideas that had already been given wide currency by Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence. (p. 126) "...