This is an "About the Author" for Stephen Spender. Most of this information is available on the internet, but I condensed the important points for my A level exam - stuff that's relevant in an answer.
1. Poet and critic Stephen Spender was born in 1909 in London. He was
a member of the generation of British poets who came to prominence
in the 1930s, a group—sometimes referred to as the Oxford
Poets—that included W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day
Lewis, and Louis MacNeice.
2. In an essay on Spender’s work in Chicago Tribune Book World,
Gerald Nicosia wrote, “While preserving a reverence for traditional
values and a high standard of craftsmanship, [these poets] turned
away from the esotericism of T.S. Eliot, insisting that the writer stay in
touch with the urgent political issues of the day and that he speak in a
voice whose clarity can be understood by all.”
3. Difference between Spender and W.H.Auden - Spender’s name
was most frequently associated with that of W.H. Auden, perhaps the
most famous poet of the 1930s. However, some critics, including
Alfred Kazin and Helen Vendler, found the two poets dissimilar in
many ways. In the New Yorker, for example, Vendler observed that
“at first [Spender] imitated Auden’s self-possessed ironies, his
determined use of technological objects. … But no two poets can
have been more different. Auden’s rigid, brilliant, peremptory,
categorizing, allegorical mind demanded forms altogether different
from Spender’s dreamy, liquid, guilty, hovering sensibility. Auden is a
poet of firmly historical time, Spender of timeless nostalgic space.” In
the New York Times Book Review Kazin similarly concluded that
Spender “was mistakenly identified with Auden.
- PYLON POETS - Although they were virtual opposites in personality
and in the direction of their talents, they became famous at the same
time as ‘pylon poets’—among the first to put England’s gritty industrial
landscape of the 1930s into poetry.”
- The term “pylon poets” refers to “The Pylons,” a poem by Spender
that many critics described as typical of the Auden generation. The
much-anthologized work, included in one of Spender’s earliest
collections, Poems (1933), as well as in his Collected Poems,
1928-1985, includes imagery characteristic of the group’s style and
reflects the political and social concerns of its members. In The Angry
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