"Exiles From Their Land, History Their Domicile"
The Still Centre (1939)
Kontext: History has tongues
Has angels has guns — has saved has praised —
Today proclaims
Achievements of her exiles long returned
Now no more rootless, for whom her printed page
Glazes their bruised waste years in one
Balancing present sky.
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"Ultima Ratio Regum"
The Still Centre (1939)
Kontext: Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?
Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html <br class="br">Kontext: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.
"Experience"
The Still Centre (1939)
"Exiles From Their Land, History Their Domicile"
The Still Centre (1939)
“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”
As quoted in The New York Times (26 March 1961)
"An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum"
Ruins and Visions (1942)
"Ultima Ratio Regum"
The Still Centre (1939)
"An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum" in Modern British Poetry (1962) edited by Louis Untermeyer (1962) variant : Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor.
Ruins and Visions (1942)
“For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust”
"What I Expected Was" (l. 25–28). . .
“There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.”
Lecture at Brooklyn College, as quoted in The New York Times (20 November 1984)
"Napoleon In 1814"
The Still Centre (1939)
“History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.”
As quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Times (1993) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 247
"Darkness And Light"
The Still Centre (1939)
Remark in 1980, after riding in a taxi for 287 miles, after his plane was grounded because of bad weather, to attend a dinner date with Jacqueline Onassis; as quoted in "Stephen Spender, Toady: Was there any substance to his politics and art?" by Stephen Metcalf at Slate.com (7 February 2005) http://www.slate.com/id/2113164/
"The Express" (l. 1–3) in Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1988) edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair
"To A Spanish Poet" (for Manuel Altolaguirre)
The Still Centre (1939)
