'From 1931 onwards,' Stephen Spender wrote, 'in common with many other people, I felt hounded by external events.' The date is not an arbitrary one: 1931 was the watershed between the post-war years and the pre-war years, the point at which the mood of the 'thirties first became generally apparent. (p. 65)

[By] 1931 many people in England certainly had begun to see the crisis in which they lived as more than a temporary economic reverse—to see it rather as the collapse of an inherited system of values, and the end of a secure life. (p. 66)

External events, if they are dire enough—a war, or the collapse of a society—challenge the value of private acts, and put the personal life to the test. For a young man (Spender was twenty-two in 1931) such a crisis, coming at a time when he was trying to define himself and his place in the world, must have been profoundly disorienting and disturbing.

When the young man is a poet, and the private act that he values is the writing of a poem, then a crisis in society becomes a literary problem. Is the role of a poet a defensible one in such a time? And if it is, what sort of poem should he write? Is the traditionally private content of lyric poetry, for example, appropriate to a time of public distress? In a situation that seems to demand action, can any poem be a sufficient act? These are all questions that imaginative writers faced throughout the 'thirties, and answered in various ways; they are the subjects of the best of 'thirties literary criticism, too, and they enter, colour, and sometimes distort many of the decade's best and most characteristic poems.

Spender wrote two poems in 1931 that show how these questions entered and disturbed his life: 'What I expected' …, and 'I think continually of those who were truly great'…. The general subject of both poems is heroism—not brave deeds performed, but the young man's dream of valuable personal behaviour…. How exactly is one to act heroically in a time that is a 'chaos of values'? This is what the two poems are really about—the problem of heroic action; and in this they belong to their time.

'What I expected' is the more personal of the two, and the more negative. It deals with the disparity between the young man's dream of an heroic adult self, and his discovery of unheroic adult reality; this is, of course, a traditional subject—the disillusionment of growing up. (p. 67)

['I think continually of those who were truly great'] is one of Spender's best known [poems]…. It is also a young man's poem, a vision of heroism in traditional, romantic images. The vision is a noble and affirmative one, and the poem is very moving, and very youthful. Still, one must note that the vision is retrospective: the verbs are in the past tense, the truly great are gone…. So here again, though less directly, the separation of the present from the heroic past, and of the Self from the Hero, is made. (p. 69)

Neither of these poems could be called polemical or political or topical: neither urges a cause or proposes an action, or links its subject explicitly to immediate history. Language and imagery are entirely timeless, with none of the contemporary urban-industrial content that came to be the mark of the generation…. If they are nevertheless poems of their time, it is because they record a generation's state of mind…. (p. 70)

Spender's 'Poetry and Revolution' [an essay published in 1933] … is important because it is thoughtful, lucid, and honest (the qualities that his best poems also have). The problem that Spender deals with is one that every artist in the 'thirties had to face: what is the right relation between art and action?… Spender was the first of the young writers to address the question at length, and with critical and moral intelligence.

Spender's essay is an act of self-defence against an invisible but easily imagined antagonist—a hard-line communist, with a set of accusations and demands that are new to literary discourse. This new opponent argues that the bourgeois artist is an idealist and an individualist, and that what he writes is necessarily bourgeois propaganda, whereas it is the duty of the revolutionary artist to produce revolutionary propaganda and proletarian art. Spender opens his defence with a defiant sentence: 'Of human activities, writing poetry is one of the least revolutionary,' and goes on to argue the case for a traditional view of the artist, even in a revolutionary time. There is, he says, an inevitable relation between an artist and his culture: a bourgeois cannot choose to join the proletariat as an artist, because his imagination and his creative sources are formed, and will remain bourgeois; and in any case there is no proletarian tradition for him to attach himself to. But what he writes need not be propaganda for his own class; if he is truly an artist, his work will perform art's historic role of revealing to men the reality of the present and the past. So art will serve the revolution by telling revolutionaries the truth.

Spender argued that artists should not let themselves be 'led astray into practical politics'. He based his argument on the conviction—which he held throughout the 'thirties—that there is a deeper sense of political, beyond party politics, which is simply the truth about historic public issues, and which it is the artist's responsibility to reveal. This is a romantic notion of the artist, as a man with a superior morality and a higher responsibility …, but it is a strong defence against the demand for submersion of self in party. (pp. 104-05)

One can see [in the essay that there] is essentially an argument between language-as-art and language-as-propaganda, and that Spender, in urging the function of poetry as a preserver of pure meanings, was being conservative and counter-revolutionary, in spite of his expressed political sympathies. (p. 106)

Vienna is a poem not so much about the history of [the Austrian February Uprising] as about the mythology. It is not a narrative, though it includes narrative passages: it does not tell the whole story, it ignores chronology, and it does not explain. What Spender seems to have aimed at was the expression of his own personal sense of Vienna: the poem includes, but is not limited to, the public events of the uprising, and it deals with even those events in a private way.

Formally, Vienna is rather like [Auden's] The Orators: the same division into dissimilar parts, the same mixture of modes, local obscurities, jokes, sudden shifts of tone, the same overlapping of political and sexual problems. Like The Orators it is concerned with a sick society and the need for action, and for a 'healer'. But there is one essential difference: by the time that Vienna was written, violent political events had occurred, a failed revolution had become history, and hence susceptible to re-telling and mythologizing. Vienna has the quality that Ezra Pound said all epics have: it is a poem containing history.

There is another difference, too: Vienna includes an 'I' who is not an invented persona (like Auden's Airman) but an experiencing self. Spender had gone to Vienna shortly after the uprising, and he had witnessed the public consequences of failed heroic action. He was young, and he was politically in sympathy with the workers' action, and one gets from his account his spectator's excitement at the drama of events. But he was also a young man living a troubled and emotional private life, and elements of that life are also part of the poem. This gives it, along with its epic side, something of the character of a long lyric poem, in which all events are filtered through a private sensibility.

A confused city, apparently shortly after the violent suppression of the uprising, and a confused young man—a stranger to the city and its people, troubled in his own life, desiring love, uncertain of his sexual identity: these are the constituents of the poem. The young man observes, records, and feels the public themes—the authoritarian rulers, the brooding unemployed workers, the political antagonisms—but he also feels his private troubles, and weaves his introspection through the poem. Between the public themes and the private ones there is no necessary connection, except the identity of the poet-observer, but the implication is … that history, this history of violence and betrayal, alters and inhibits love. The point is imperfectly made, and the poem remains in some ways fundamentally incoherent, but this assumption, which is so recurrent through the 'thirties, seems clear enough—that in a time of public catastrophe, private lives will be catastrophic, too. (pp. 145-46)

The problem is set entirely in psycho-sexual terms; sexual crisis seems to have been a crucial part of the Vienna experience.

But the solution that the poem offers is not set in sexual terms, but in vaguely revolutionary terms that seem to offer an alternative mode of action that will also be a cure for the 'desert' that the speaker feels in his breast. He imagines a stranger, another of those healing heroes who are central to the 'thirties myth, whose coming will drive out the sicknesses of the past, and all the introspective, self-regarding forms of love, the 'liars and buggers under the dark lid of centuries', and will integrate the creative, revolutionary forces that are already gathering, into a new life…. [The end of the poem is] visionary and positive, but without being very clear. Revolution apparently cures not only social sickness, but also private psychological sickness; the imagined stranger is at once a Leader and a Healer, and it is hard to say which the young man in the poem desires more.

Vienna is an unsuccessful poem, and one can see at once why it was likely to fail. Spender was attempting to mythologize immediate political events, to create an instant myth rather than allowing it to emerge; and at the same time he was trying to reproduce honestly his own feelings of the moment. So there is an uncertain mixture in the poem of politics and self, public and private, working in opposite directions, and obscuring each other. The problems of writing personally about public events in which one has played no part are very considerable (I can think of only one modern poet—Yeats—who has managed to do so successfully); there is an obvious temptation to make the self the subject and Spender did, so that, as one critic wrote of Vienna, 'we are led, on the whole, not only to pity for these Socialists, but also to a view of the poet himself in the act of being pitiful'. Beyond those problems, there was another that has to do with dramatic form: the February Uprising was a disastrous defeat, of the kind only appropriate to tragedy. But tragedy and revolution are surely not compatible. In Marxist terms, historical reversals are not tragic but simply inevitable parts of the dialectical process, to be acknowledged and incorporated into a 'correct' understanding of historical change. So Spender settled for defeat, with a bit of revolutionary hope at the end.

Spender is an acute critic, of his own works as well as of those of others, and his comments on Vienna, and the feelings behind it, are helpful to an understanding both of the poem and of the time…. [He wrote] that the effect of public violence was to undermine private feelings, that political emotions may overpower and mask private ones. So that the very failure of his poem has a political meaning. (pp. 147-50)

Both the sense of historical process and the critical defensiveness [of important critical writings of 1935] can be seen very clearly in Spender's The Destructive Element, published in [that year]. Spender had set out to write a study of Henry James, an enterprise that seems on the face of it more Bloomsburyish than revolutionary; but his idea of the book changed, as he thought about it, 'into that of a book about modern writers and beliefs, or unbeliefs; which turned again into a picture of writers grouped round the "destructive element", wondering whether or not to immerse themselves'. This three-stage change of mind corresponds to the three-part shape that the book finally took: first a section on James; then one on Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence (in whom Spender saw the crisis of belief manifested); and finally a section on contemporary writers, for whom the fact of a world without beliefs is taken for granted as the base from which literary activity should begin. It seems reasonable to suppose that this form also corresponds to stages in Spender's own thinking about literature and belief, as his awareness of history grew during the early-'thirties years when he was writing the book. At any rate, the book he finally published is one in which the critical posture changes as the argument moves toward the present.

The 'destructive element' of the title is the phrase from Conrad's Lord Jim, but that is not Spender's immediate source. As he explains in his introduction, he took the phrase, and the argument of which it is a part, from [I. A. Richards' influential footnote on The Waste Land, advising poets: 'In the destructive element immerse. That is the way.'] (p. 162)

Spender's sense of … tradition, and his place in it, is very clear: he begins with James, whom he sees as a great writer forced by his attitude toward a decadent civilization to create an inner world of art; then Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence—'Three Individualists', Spender calls them—all moralists aware of the 'destructive element', but each seeking an individual solution to his problem…. Spender's achievement was to demonstrate their common element of social criticism, and to claim them, on the basis of that element, as the true ancestors of his own generation. (pp. 163-64)

[His] insistence on the moral subject [necessary to art] is one of the principal motifs of Spender's book, and one of its strengths; but it is an argument for individualism—the artist decides what is moral—and one can see that it would offend the ideologues of the Left Review. The examples he cites, and his concern for the expression of non-realistic manifestations of the moral life, point to still another problem; Spender is defending the importance of literary form, the imaginative shapes that moral meaning may be given, and the right of the artist to follow his imagination, and to invent parables….

[Spender argued] against ideology: a work of art that is concerned with a serious moral-political subject will have moral weight, but if it is really a work of art it will be translucent—its meaning will shine out, but diffused by the strategies of the formal medium. Spender throughout his book defends the parabolic impulses of art—the difficult, the avant-garde, the experimental, the visionary—all of those strategies by which the writer protects his complex vision from simplification; and he rejects dogmatic communism because

it seems likely … that the Communist explanation of our society is not adequate to produce considerable art: it is adequate only to use art to serve its own purposes.

It is a difficult position to maintain, spraddled between revolution and tradition, and exposed on both sides; but Spender managed to do it, and to write a skilful and moving defence of the necessity of art in a revolutionary time. (p. 165)

[In 1937 Spender] went to Spain as a propagandist—he was to broadcast from Valencia—and both the propagandist role and the non-combatant status must have created problems. And so, surely, did his poetic sensibility, which was naturally lyrical and emotional, and not inclined to deal in history and abstractions. (pp. 248-49)

[Spender] separated individuals altogether from history and ideas. In his Spanish poems no distinctions are made between one side and the other, there is no enemy and no clear cause, there is not even, in most of them, an observing self. What remains is suffering individuals, and an overwhelming, unqualified compassion for them.

The poetry, then, is in the pity. Of all the English poets of the Spanish war, Spender was most clearly indebted to the example of Owen, and he was clearly conscious of his debt…. [Wilfred] Owen was not, for Spender, a technical influence …; his example was a moral one, a matter of truth-telling. (pp. 249-50)

There is something missing from Spender's war poems, some authority for the right to pity; without that authority, which perhaps a poet must earn by sharing in suffering, pity becomes a patronising, distant attitude. Spender's experience of war had been compassion for those who fought, and anger for those who made propaganda, but these feelings had been distanced by the fact that Spender was neither a soldier nor a Spaniard. His compassion is in the poems, but so is the distance. They are, even the best of them, the war poems of a tourist. (p. 251)

[Spender's retreat from communism] occurred during 1937, just at the point at which he seemed to be most committed to [it]. During the latter part of 1936 he had been at work on a book which would express, as he put it, 'a personal attitude towards communism'. The book was announced in October under the title Approach to Communism, but when it appeared, in January 1937, the title had been altered to Forward from Liberalism. That change, from arrival to departure, is significant. For what Spender had tried to do in his book was to attach communism to the English liberal tradition, making it simply the latest and most contemporary expression of those values of individual freedom and justice that had been held by the great liberal idealists…. (pp. 261-62)

Forward from Liberalism is, as Spender said, a personal book, and it is valuable for that reason: it is the best testament that exists of the state of mind of a young literary man of good will in the mid-'thirties—eager to be active in the service of humanity, but jealous in defence of the privileges of art, and experienced only in the life and thought of his own circle….

[But communists] attacked Spender bitterly for criticizing the conduct of the Moscow trials, and other communists joined in; the book was reviewed unfavourably in the Daily Worker ('It is clear that Spender has not come very far "Forward from Liberalism'")…. (p. 262)

Spender's response was to join the Party, and to recant his remarks on the trials in an article in the Worker, and then to leave for propaganda work in Spain…. [But] by the end of the year he was writing the defence of individualism …; and when asked to contribute to the pamphlet, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, he replied:

I support in Spain exactly such a movement in liberal and liberating nationalism as the English liberals supported in many countries still groaning under feudalism in the nineteenth century.

So the Worker was right, Spender had not come very far Forward from Liberalism, or if he had, he had brought Liberalism with him. His belief in disinterestedness, justice, objectivity, and the aesthetic experience as an end in itself had not changed much from New Country to Forward from Liberalism; what had changed, that brought him briefly into the Communist Party, was history. And history took him out again. (p. 263)

The date of [Spender's Trial of a Judge, 1938,] is important, for it is a time when Germans might still have resisted fascism, and so the play is a cautionary tale for nations in which liberalism has not yet failed.

That is the principal theme of the play—the failure of liberalism and law under the pressure of fascism. (p. 303)

Spender called his play a tragedy. If it is one, it is a tragedy of liberalism; the principal line of action is the decline and fall of the Judge, who stands for the liberal faith in absolute justice and the rule of law, and who fails because his liberal values are weaker than the power of absolute, valueless evil. Certainly this is a shape that tragedy may take—the good man destroyed by his goodness, pulled down from his place by an antagonist that his values, however right and moral, are inadequate to deal with. The trouble with the play as a tragedy is that, though the Judge is the central figure, he represents no power in the play. (pp. 303-04)

The conflict is between fascists and communists, and in this conflict the values of liberalism are irrelevant.

But even that is not much of a conflict, for the fascists seem from the beginning to be an irresistible force…. The conquest of liberalism is so easy and inevitable that the play seems to be entirely about consequences…. [The] reality of the final scene is not a communist's vision, but a liberal's nightmare, of a world mastered by fascism, from which history has been abolished. (p. 304)

Intermingled with this political theme is another, which is a continual private accompaniment to statements of public terror …: the theme of the destruction of love by the power of hatred…. Fascism is the denial of love and life, and life-deniers are drawn to it. But personal feelings are also denied to those on the other side; in the conflict of Right and Left, it seems that there can be no place for private emotions: love, like liberalism and law, must wait for a time of peace.

By the force of its poetic langauge the play affirms the value of love, law, and justice; but its action demonstrates the power of barbarousness to destroy those values…. For Spender, the spirit of Europe was clearly the spirit of liberalism, which had created European civilization, and the force that opposed and destroyed it was not a European political force, but the total denial of what Europe means. Against this power of barbarism there seemed only one possible barrier—the power of the proletariat, organized by the communists. But communism in the play is no longer a movement forward from liberalism; it is discontinuous with that creating spirit, an alternate violent force that would exact its costs in love and justice, as fascism did. It is also discontinuous with the workers as they actually are in the world of the play…. By the time he wrote the play, Spender was no longer thinking like a communist (if he ever had); but more important, he was not imagining like a communist, and though his choruses assert the triumph of the workers, his play is really an elegy for the death of liberalism and of Europe. (pp. 305-07)

Spender was emotional, enthusiastic, naive, and quick to commit himself, but he was also intelligent and honest. He felt early in the ['thirties] the urgency of political circumstances, and he responded vigorously; but he also felt a deep and steady commitment to his vocation as a poet. Because he was naive, he believed, longer than most, that he could reconcile these two loyalties, not only to his own satisfaction, but to the satisfaction of other poets and other Marxists, and so he was continually criticized, by literary men for being too political, and by political men for being too literary. (pp. 359-60)

He had always found orthodoxy difficult, and he had always tended to take great issues personally, as though every public event were a potential lyric poem. And yet one side of his nature desired the sure solutions of orthodoxy—hence the personal struggle that got confused with the class struggle.

There are evidences of this struggle in virtually everything that Spender wrote in [1938, the] last year of peace…. Even in his most militant political days Spender had not managed to still [his poet's] voice for long; in the last months of the decade it grew stronger, as the hopes of the Left grew weaker, and spoke with a sombre authority.

One name for that authority is the tragic sense. Spender had come to feel, as others had, that the good causes had suffered too many defeats, that it was now too late for any opposition except the disastrous opposition of war. That feeling is very clear in the introduction that he wrote for Poems for Spain, an anthology of poems of the Spanish Civil War that was published in March 1939. That was the month in which the Loyalists surrendered at Madrid, and though Spender's essay was written earlier, it is in the mood of that ending.

As so often in Spender's writing, [this essay] is a public statement about a political issue that is also a private confession of feeling. What Spender is recording here is the end of the Spanish struggle as an issue in history: it had been a cause that action might win; now, being tragic, it can only be a meaning to be understood.

In the face of such defeats, Spender drew back from political commitment, as Auden had done, to a defensive position from which poetry, at least, might be defended. The New Realism, a pamphlet published in May 1939, is his definition of that position. The point of view of the pamphlet is ostensibly socialist and revolutionary, but the principal arguments are not ones that Spender's Marxist acquaintances would have found agreeable, for they amount to a theory of disengagement from the world of action. 'The duty of the artist,' Spender writes in his opening paragraph, 'is to remain true to standards which he can discover only within himself.'… But the artist himself may be a reactionary…. 'What is important is the analysis, and not the means of achieving the change, which is not the primary concern of art.' (pp. 360-62)

[Bourgeois] writers will have to go on analyzing what they know—that is, their own bourgeois world. On this point Spender attacks [Christopher] Caudwell, who had written in Illusion and Reality that the writer's only hope was to join the communist movement and identify himself with the interests of the working class. Spender rejects this notion entirely, and in so doing rejects the entire left-wing political commitment of his generation, including his own; the passage reads like a farewell to the hopes and illusions of the mid-decade, the years when action seemed possible…. (p. 362)

[In] personal terms it means that the artist accepts his inability to alter reality, and makes that inability his subject. It is, therefore, another aspect of that view of life which starts from the sense of human limitation—that is, the tragic view.

This separation of art from action is, like so many of Spender's utterances, a personal as well as a theoretical statement: it is a renunciation of his militant years, a confession of the failure of such effort. But it is also, more positively, a renewed commitment to art, not as an instrument of political change, but as a human value. This confessional note is especially clear in the final paragraph of the essay, in which Spender pleads for a new kind of criticism which would judge writers by the truth of their analysis rather than by their stated opinions…. Spender called this position 'The New Realism', but it was not new for him; it was rather a return to the position that he had taken in 'Poetry and Revolution' in 1933. And so this later essay seems a judgment, at the decade's end, of all the activist effort of the intervening years; poetically speaking, it had all been a mistake, a wasteful diversion of energies from the creative centre of his life to the political rim.

That image of centre and perimeter appears also in The Still Centre, the book of poems that Spender published in the same month in which The New Realism appeared. it was Spender's first collection since Poems in 1934, and he put into it all the work that he wished to preserve from the intervening five years; it therefore amounts to a record of Spender's ideas and concerns through those years, and is a parallel in poetry to the account of his career that he gives in The New Realism. (pp. 363-64)

'Darkness and Light', and the poems that follow it [in the last section of The Still Centre], are most interesting for what they exclude: there are no suffering poor here, no exiles, no heroes, and no politics. Spender takes his body as the world, and self as the whole subject. There are poems of childhood and of lost love, and introspective self-examinations, and even a poem entitled 'The Human Situation' is entirely concerned with subjective experience. Only in the last poem in the book does Spender return to the other, public world. It is an elegy for a Spanish poet, and is inevitably set in the context of the Civil War; but even that world becomes an inner landscape, a parable of the sense of personal loss…. The similarity between this poem and Auden's elegy on Yeats is unavoidable. It is not a matter of influence or imitation, but of a common occasion and a shared mood: a dead poet, a lost cause, a violent time, and a felt need to rejoice (the word occurs at the end of both poems) in spite of the darkness. They are poems of their time, for their time.

Together The New Realism and The Still Centre announced the end of Spender's uneasy alliance with communism…. Spender had reached the point of believing that poetry makes nothing happen, and to do so was to be confronted with the problem of finding a new subject matter. He had ceased to believe in the 'new world', or that he could make himself single-hearted by any possible effort. And so he turned back, as he said, to the personal; if the conflicts that he had felt in the troubled 'thirties could not be solved by action, then the best thing for a poet was to make those conflicts his subject, to re-enter the self and the personal past. (pp. 365-67)

Samuel Hynes, in his The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (copyright © 1976 by Samuel Hynes; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission of The Viking Penguin Inc.), Viking Penguin, 1977.