[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.]

"Lines for Roy Fuller", one of the poems in Stephen Spender's new collection [Dolphins], reminded me of the powerful effect Spender's Poems of 1932 had on the youthful Fuller. He knew a good many passages by heart: so did I, and we used to cap each other's quotations. There is a suggestion of the influence those early poems had on our generation in Fuller's autobiography, when he says a poem of Spender's about the unemployed helped to advance "the concept of a poetry of direct social function" reaching beyond "the provision of stimulating or consolatory sounds and images". Nowadays it might be felt that to write about unemployment without being unemployed would be an act of condescension; then we were more innocent or more generous. The indignation and idealism of these poems, and the assurance that seemed to lie behind them, probably made a more immediate impression than Auden's first collection, even among those who recognized Auden as the more talented poet.

The poem for Fuller first appeared as part of a tribute on his seventieth birthday. The version printed here is considerably different, but both confirm a feeling that Spender characteristically composes with his eye off the original subject. "Lines of yours I first read were of war / In Africa": that opening is markedly inaccurate, for Roy Fuller saw no shots fired in anger in Africa. The subsequent lines about soldiers silhouetted against the sky, their killing machines, and a final vision of the resemblance of the scene to a painting by Carpaccio—all these are "sounds and images" imported by the poet, quite irrelevant to what theoretically prompted them.

The point is worth making because the approach is typical. If Stephen Spender ever intended to create a poetry of "direct social function", the idea was long ago abandoned in favour of a concern to express in verse his own true beliefs and attitudes, about which he remains permanently uncertain. Much the longest, and much the finest, poem in his new collection is a life of Rimbaud done in short dramatic scenes, beginning with Verlaine's botched attempt to shoot him ("Mad aunt! Crazed shepherdess! Fuck off!" Rimbaud cries), and moving back and forwards in time to include mother-love, the Commune, rejection of Parisian literary life, contrasts between Communist beliefs and capitalist actions, gun-running in Africa, death. "I am / The poem made solid that is real", Rimbaud tells his mother. The reality is gold, hard cash, abandonment of any idea that the poet may be "Visionary, Prophet, Magus of / One unreal final ultimate / Of Hell or Heaven".

The sequence is successful in part because Spender can have found no difficulty in imagining himself both Rimbaud and Verlaine, in part because of his strong dramatic sense. Elsewhere there are one or two successful poems that don't attempt very much, and some sadly slack writing. "Nature abhors a vacuum" is a truism/cliché one might hope any poet would avoid, but here it pops up twice. Frequently there is what appears a straining to produce a "poetic" image, so that branches in a wood "seemed high as a cathedral", and in another poem the writer stands "silent, thinking of / Images to recall this moment", images which duly appear. So this must be a disappointing collection for those who admire the early poems and are moved by the passionate raw emotion in some later ones such as "No Orpheus, No Eurydice" and "The Double Shame". Yet as one looks back, Spender's principal achievement seems to have been less his poems or any particular piece of prose than the candour of the ceaseless critical self-examination he has conducted for more than half a century in autobiography, journals, criticism, poems.

Valentine Cunningham's British Writers in the Thirties (1988) excepts Spender from a general condemnation of his circle, on the ground of his honesty. Spender went to Spain and, Cunningham says, wrote unheroic poems about his experiences there, pieces distinct from what he calls the "potential bogusness" of stay-at-homes, who produced mock-heroic pieces like Day Lewis's "The Volunteer" and Jack Lindsay's "On Guard For Spain". Cunningham calls Auden a Spanish tripper, and remarks on the "disconcerted aloofness" of his poem about the Civil War. Spender got his friend out of a Spanish prison, never adopted anything like a heroic attitude, and was the first among his colleagues to deny publicly any merit in "the attempt to make poetry serve a cause". Those who died in the war, he said, were not heroes but simply "freezing or rotted lumps of isolated insanity".

At times, the frankness seems almost deliberately self-lacerating. Who else would have cared to reprint between book covers forty years after the event the article he wrote in the Daily Worker on joining the Communist Party in 1937, with its general acceptance that the Party line was sacred, and its belief in the official version at the first of the Moscow trials of dissidents? What other British writer would in 1951 have dared to write with candour about his earlier homosexuality, as Spender did in his memorable autobiography, World Within World? None of his close contemporaries, certainly, who admitted their past activities only when the climate had made it safe to do so. And his journals, published over the past half-century and more, are valuable not only as an evocation of one kind of literary life during the period, but as a ruthless examination of the character of Stephen Spender. The figure created is generous but self-distrustful and self-deprecating. His opinions are sometimes contradictory, but we are never in doubt that they express what he thought at the time. The second paragraph of a journal started when war began in 1939 states that he finds it hard to put words on paper; sometimes can't spell them. "I feel as if I could not write again". Perhaps he did feel like that at the time, but this is the first of nearly 500 pages. Does one wish that consciousness of this possible absurdity had prompted deletion of the sentence? Certainly not. That Spender had these feelings, in those first wartime days, is an element in the self-portrait.

His attractive waywardness and sharp perceptions are shown throughout the journals: for instance, in a gently ironic aside about Conrad Aiken, after Aiken had said subtly deprecatory things about his old friend Tom Eliot. Aiken, Spender observes, is a sort of Greek Chorus to Eliot's fame. "The Greek Chorus is capable, of course, of acid comment." Friends, even close friends, are not immune from criticism, although this is often self-involved and sometimes contradicted. Sonia Orwell and Auden are cases in point. A pungent character sketch of Sonia Orwell says she attacks people at parties "with a virulence which goes beyond the decencies of the particular gathering", attacks that cover "some kind of underlying changeless virginity" but make her behave at times like a school prefect or bossy hospital nurse. Not a particular friend, one might think. But a quarter of a century later, Spender dedicated a book to her in affectionate terms, and on her death, after a page of fairly cool speculation about her love affairs or lack of them, and mention of her pretentiousness, ends up surprisingly with "she remained underneath the warmhearted generous spontaneous person she was all her life".

Slightly comic—one can never be sure with Spender whether or not the comedy is deliberate—is the effect of a question after a lecture asking whether he had really liked Auden. He worke in the night, thinking: "Did I really like Wystan?" Auden had been such an important factor in Spender's life as a writer that one would have thought the question could hardly arise, but Spender's shrewd conclusion after half a page of speculation is that his relationship to Auden is "that of a somewhat battered observer". He has a witty phrase earlier in relation to Auden's obsessively rigid adherence to exact times for eating, drinking, going to bed, rising: "Auden had an open mind about sex but a closed one about clocks".

Perhaps the shadow of Auden has always fallen over Spender as poet, and affected his work. It has not done so in an obvious way, for unlike some other contemporaries—Day Lewis the prime example—who produced poems that were faint carbon copies of the master's, Spender avoided from the beginning Auden's tricks of language, metrical experiments, intricate poetic forms. A Spender poem frequently starts with something physically seen, which is then transformed through an image or a series of images into an expression of personal feeling. Of course, the procedure varies, but he is almost never concerned with the problems of (say) the sonnet or the sestina, or with strict metres. Even the occasional use of rhyme seems casual, rarely integral to the poem. The journals contain a good many ideas and speculations among their accounts of places visited, people met, lectures given, but they are never concerned with the technique of poetry, and it would seem that this was not a subject that (with the exception of the form of verse drama) greatly interested Spender.

The freedom gained in this way was at first beneficial, but in the end limiting or even damaging. What seems at times an almost passionate determination to avoid "a poetry of direct social function", combined with a fading of intensity in the images that have been so important to Spender's finest poetry, has led to the production of some distinctly low-temperature verse. Stephen Spender's poetic output, more than that of most writers, needs sieving. The right kind of selection would show him to be, as he has been for a couple of decades, an underrated poet.