Summary
Summary Stephen Spender - "VIII" - Analysis
This is a summary and analysis of the poem "VIII" by Stephen Spender.
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Spender tackles head-on in a post-Freudian fashion the idea of selfhood asconflicted. The creative self is at war with a bundle of other selves; it is depicted as
"Quarelling with 'I tiring' and 'I sleeping'/ "And all those other 'I's' who long for 'We
dying'".
Yet Spender retains a strong conviction of the self as continuous even as it evolves.
He is, as he contrasts and compares himself with Auden and Day Lewis, "an
autobiographer restlessly searching for forms in which to express the stages of my
development."
Among his finest moments of critical thought about his commitment to individuality in
World Within World is his account of the poet's vocation. Spender asserts that -
"Most writers allow their ideas to lead them back from terrifying solitude to the
consolatory society of approximate and familiar phrases." By contrast - "The writer
who clings to his own metaphor is facing his own loneliness", an encounter that is
likely to result "in conflict with current ideas among people surrounding him, and
face-to-face" with the terrifying truth of his own isolated existence.
Again, one notices how this "terrifying truth" serves as a guarantor of existential
authenticity. Spender "clings to his own metaphor" in poem after poem in the 30's,
doing so through a rhythm and syntax that mime encounters with the unforeseen,
blockage, the aporetic.
In this poem, Spender proposes that those who rise above the rest of mankind in
this life do so through a complete selflessness which exists, as it were, outside the
day-to-day workings of the body and the mind. But, by being outside of the great
man's normal life, this selflessness is paradoxically the man's deepest interior, the
"Central 'I'".
The "great 'I'"is not immortal, but it has an energy and love for life which drives it to
act as if it were. This "great 'I'" is an "unfortunate intruder" in a double-sided way:
unfortunate itself, because it must tolerate the weak, lazy, death-directed attitudes of
the body and ego; and unfortunate from the POV of "all those other 'I's', because the
"great 'I'" makes their self-satisfied drifting through life quite difficult and
uncomfortable.
In other poems by Spender, this role of foil to the ego is played by the "great 'I'" in
different ways – sometimes by a celebration of mental and imaginative powers,
sometimes by a celebration of the body and other times by a general exaltation of
everything the world contains.
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