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Summary Stephen Spender - "XXX" - Analysis
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This is a summary and analysis of the poem "XXX" by Stephen Spender.
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Spender rejects the 'consolation' offered by the 'curving beauty of thatline / Traced on our graphs through history'. Once more, he shapes a
productive tension between his practice and that of his forebears: "that
line" is both a lineage constituting a poetic tradition and the very line
employed by Spender in his poem.
Spender rejects sentimentality and poetic transcendence in his
treatment of the poor, but his protestations – "No, I shall weave no
tracery of pen-ornament" – seem to know that they are backfiring. This
line concedes the inability of the poet not to weave a 'tracery of
pen-ornament'. But again, Spender succeeds in writing a poem by
voicing doubts about poetry in a way that the Romantics inaugurate.
This is one of Spender's poems which contains within itself the best
that can be said about it. In a way - this poem sums up most of
Spender's work. There is an unflinching honesty, a refusal to stylise or
make the content conversational.
Spender writes the simple truth the best way he can, so that even his
metaphors seem to be hammered into the poem. One feels in
Spender, like one does in almost no one else, the effort of the writing -
which gives the poem an air of knowing weariness, making it that
much more real.
Spender has neither the airy intelligence of Auden not MacNiece's
flowing way with words: he has only am earthy gravity of feeling, but
that too, as this poem clearly demonstrates, is a are and splendid gift.
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