If one were to look at the life of Stephen Spender briefly they would think that he was a bizarre maybe even troubled man. However, if you look deeply into his life you will see beyond the strangeness. Stephen was indeed a unique man that lived a complicated life to which created his uniqueness that we see demonstrated through his poetry. While most people tend to avoid unintentional controversy, Stephen Spender wrote many poems which most of us would feel as controversial. His goal however was not to start controversy but to stand up for the rights of all people and the rights for us to all express ourselves freely.
Spender was born on February 28, 1909 in London England. His parent’s names were Edward Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster. Stephen Spender's mother came from a wealthy Jewish family. Spender’s dad was a supporter of the liberal cause and he strongly believed in idealism. His father provided the family with a comfortable life style and didn't believe in wasting money. Stephen Spender spent most of his childhood in Hampstead and Norfolk. Stephen had a sister and two brothers. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Stephen Spenders mother died when he was twelve years old. His father died when Stephen was seventeen. Hilda Schuster which was Stephens’s grandmother raised him. She influenced him to set high goals and understand why he wanted to be a poet. Stephen Spender attended the University of Oxford. He spent a lot of time there with other poets. W.H. Auden was a very close and dear friend of Stephen's. Spender was married twice. He married Natasha Litvin in 1936 and his second wife in 1941. Stephen had two children. The boy was named Mathew and the girl's name was Lizzie. Stephen died on July 16, 1995 from heart failure....
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...pics that we would steer clear from. Stephen Spender should be held in high regard for approaching such topics and teaching us the need to question our ideas and reason. Stephen Spender was greatly influenced by grandmother, which raised hum after his mother died and led him in the right direction of success in life.
Work Cited
Sir Stephen Spender. Encyclopedia Britannica. 7 Apr, 2014. www.britannica.com
Stephen Harlold Spender. Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2004. Encyclopedia.com
7 Apr. 2014
Spender, Stephen. The World Book: Encyclopedia. Chicago, London, Rome: Field Educational Enterprise, 1971
Spender, Stephen. The Language of Literature, "What I Expected" Arthur N. Applebee et al.
Evanston, IL 60204, 2006
Spender, Stephen. World within World. The Autobiography of Stephen Spender, Berkeley
University of California, 1966
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, “My Father as a Guitar” by Martin Espada, and “Digging” by Seamus Heaney are three poems that look into the past of the authors and dig up memories of the authors fathers. The poems contain similar conflicts, settings, and themes that are essential in helping the reader understand the heartfelt feelings the authors have for their fathers. With the authors of the three poems all living the gust of their life in the 1900’s, their biographical will be similar and easier to connect with each other.
Robert Frost is very successful poet from the 20th century, as well as a four time Pulitzer Prize winner. Robert Frost work was originally published in England and later would be published in the US. He was also considered one of the most popular and respected poets of his century. Robert Frost created countless of poems and plays, many of them containing similar themes. Some of the most popular themes found in his poems encompass isolation, death and everyday life.
was found guilty and hanged (Dieters, 2012). Seven years later, Fitzpatrick’s former roommate confessed to the murder on his deathbed. Residents of Detroit were outraged that an innocent man had been put to death. Then, two years following Fitzpatrick’s execution, another Detroit resident, Stephen Simmons, was tried and convicted of killing his pregnant wife during a drunken rage. His execution was made into an event resembling a carnival, complete with a band, local merchants selling their goods, and a seating section for spectators.. When asked if he had any last words, Simmons recited a poem. His “appeal to the heavens” shocked witnesses. The execution was called “cruel and vindictive” by onlookers. The result of these two cases was an
“Death is like a flower growing in a patch of weeds. Even where there is bad/evil the end will be beautiful.” The simile I wrote means that every person is going to through a hard time in their life but no matter how hard or awful it is you will end in a beautiful place called Haven. While reading William Cullen Bryant’s poem I came to the conclusion that we have somewhat of the same views. In his poem he says, “unnoticed by the living—and no friend.” I believe that he was trying to have people comprehend that even if you are unnoticed and have no friends that doesn’t change where you’ll end up in life. Today people romanticize a large number of things one being models. People romanticize models by wanting to be them and look
Robert Frost is undoubtedly gifted when it comes to his poetry, but not all aspects of his life were so easy. One of the most troubling areas in Frost’s life was his family. He held a long term engagement to his wife Elinor, whom he pleaded to marry. Also, his children were plagued with birth defects, terminal illness, and emotional instability. The Frosts lost four of their children at an early age, including daughter Elinor Bettina who died three days after birth. In 1938, after months of deteriorating health, Frost’s wife Elinor died of heart failure. Frost was so shaken that he collapsed and could not attend the memorial services. Later, in 1940, Frost was utterly disturbed by his son Carol’s suicide.
The Kings were your average family until one night when his father Donald said he was going out for a pack of cigarettes, and never returned home. Stephen at the time was only three years old. His father had a large collection of science fiction novels in which Stephen read growing up. By the time Stephen was seven years old, he wrote his first short story. He also was a fan of the 50’s horror movies, which inspired him to write in the science fiction field. Stephen’s stories were also influenced by the nineteenth century gothic tradition, especially the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. King as a teenager, joined the football team, played in a rock band, yet still had two of his short stories published.
The question is: What do you think the grandmother meant when she said to the Misfit, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” Why do you think the Misfit killed her when she said that? Since the question is two parts, I’ll answer it in two parts.
Walt Whitman’s hard childhood influenced his work greatly, he was an uneducated man but he managed to become one of the most known poets. Whitman changed poetry through his work and is now often called the father of free verse. Especially through Leaves of Grass he expressed his feelings and sexuality to world and was proud of it. He had a different view at life, his hard childhood, and his sexuality that almost no one understood made him introduce a new universal theme to the world. Almost all critics agree that Walt Whitman was one of the most influential and innovative poet. Karl Shapiro says it best, “The movement of his verses is the sweeping movement of great currents of living people with general government and state”.
wisdom Do you think that is true of the poems of Frost and the other
Poetry by William King, Martyn Lowery, Andrew Marvell, Liz Lochhead, John Cooper Clarke and Elizabeth Jennings
In reading poetry, from many different genres, its seems that politically motivated verse seems to dominate, next to love that is. It also seems that poets have a desire to live in a different time, a different place. No one ever seems to be content with the condition of their world, yet, I suppose that is in the nature of humans. We all want something better or something from the past that we can't have. Wither it be the simplicity, the passion, the technology that we don't have, the peace that once was or the greatness that has long been gone, poets that are political in nature suggest a very personal, yet pervading utopia. Two poets who, political in nature, that were born in the same year, lived in the same part of the world, and who attending the same college prove to be an interesting contrast to one another. Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin are both natives of England and are considered 'Modernists', but what they suggest isn't a "better place" or a different time. Their work represents a change in attitude, from looking at what isn't to looking at reality and what is.
He may have used this technique to make war seem if it had made men
... Stephen was exhibiting characteristics of an artist, he would take threats meant to scare children into doing the right thing and turn it into a song.
Religion and Its Effect on Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Sir Thomas Wyatt is credited as one of the first poets to bring the sonnet form into English literature, a form in which the speaker’s sincerity for, most commonly, a distant mysterious woman whom he loves, is believed to be the focal point of the poetry. From the selection of works which Wyatt wrote we can see many point in which the focal point is seemingly the earnestness of his love for his muse as authenticated by what he states in the poem itself. However, there is a sense of underlying meaning throughout his works which the reader must tease out themselves to see that that in fact is the focal point of his poetry.