In the second paragraph of this biography, John Sutherland claims ‘literary greatness’ for his subject. This may at once cause the reader to pause. Spender once wrote, ‘I think continually of those who were truly great’; but was he one of those truly great himself? Geoffrey Grigson, who always took pleasure in demolishing fellow writers even when they were friends, described him as ‘the Rupert Brooke of the Depression’. But since, like Spender himself, Rupert Brooke has been cruelly underestimated in recent years, the judgment is less damning than Grigson clearly intended it to be.
Like Brooke at the outbreak of the first world war, so Spender in the troubled Thirties became an icon for the young; like Brooke’s, the poems of his youth, so full of romantic ardour, will continue to be remembered and loved. But just as Brooke cannot be considered the equal of Wilfred Owen, so Spender cannot be considered the equal of Auden. When one reads the elegantly produced New Collected Poems one is all too often queasily aware of an awkward or banal line intruding into something otherwise inspired.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.