Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet, member of the 1930s poetic group with Auden and Day Lewis, co-founder of Horizon magazine.
On the island
Eight records
We Are SevenFavourite
I remember we went to the Lake District for holiday, and there my father read to me, or showed me, uh, the poems of Wordsworth about childhood, We're Seven, and so on, very sentimental poems, but to me they made an enormous impression.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Not recorded.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:21How early in life did verse begin to fascinate you? When did you first find the sounds of words are important?
Well, I think that when I was nine, I remember we went to the Lake District for holiday, and there my father read to me, or showed me, uh, the poems of Wordsworth about childhood, We're Seven, and so on, very sentimental poems, but to me they made an enormous impression.
Presenter asks
1:15What was it your very first ambition to be, or was it poetry from the start?
Uh I first of all wanted to be a naturalist. I imagined myself with a long white beard sitting in a garden uh full of flowers and uh green leaves and caterpillars and birds and so on. … and when did it become apparent? apparent to you that verse was to be the major thing in your life? Well, I think the moment I started seriously being taught botany, I lost interest in nature and took to poetry.
Presenter asks
2:04You've mentioned Wordsworth as a first influence. What were later influences?
I was very influenced by the Romantic poets because when I was young the Romantic poets seemed to us the sort of most perfect poets that had ever been.
Presenter asks
2:46Mister Spender, in the thirties you and WH Auden and Cecil Day Lewis were looked upon together as a group. Had you, in fact, so much in common?
De Luis and I had the friendship of Auden in common. … Orden was a great influence. He was a very powerfully intelligent man, and he was also uh scientific. … And he was anti-romantic. De Lewis and I were both romantics, and I suppose that therefore Auden influenced both of us a good deal.
Presenter asks
5:14Do you find [teaching in American universities] rewarding?
Yes. … It's very interesting to work there. It's very valuable to me because it puts me in touch with young Americans. Young Americans are intelligent and they don't feel that there's this gap between generations that people over here seem to think. They don't really feel that they belong to a different generation if they have tastes which are similar to yours.
Presenter asks
6:18Do you think the public for poetry is bigger today than it was thirty years ago?
I should say so. … I should say that uh a young poet who had anything like the same reputation that Auden de Lewis and Spender had in the nineteen thirties uh would have more people buy his poems than happened then.
“I think that when I was nine, I remember we went to the Lake District for holiday, and there my father read to me, or showed me, uh, the poems of Wordsworth about childhood, We're Seven, and so on, very sentimental poems, but to me they made an enormous impression.”
“I think if you were human beings then it was impossible not to feel strongly about, say, the concentration camps of the Nazis and so on.”
“We weren't intrinsically angry, I don't think.”
“an ivory tower existence in the sense of being on my desert island, that's to say in the sense of of cutting myself off from uh the kind of life I lead the whole time. But otherwise, no, I haven't wanted to be cut off from events.”
“I don't really like my past work at all. I like what I am going to write. That's really all that interests me.”