Brett, Michael Patrick John; (2002) Allegiance in the poetry of Stephen Spender, 1928-1935. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The study aims to provide a detailed analysis of Stephen Spender's verse up to 1935, with particular attention to his use of the language of contemporary political discourse. It examines the interrelation of Spender's poetry with the literary milieu of late modernism within which it first appeared, analysing the reception of his published volumes and the dissemination of early critical ideas about his writing. The texts which provide the basis for the study are Nine Experiments (1928), Twenty Poems (1930), Poems (1933/1934) and Vienna (1934). Also examined is the concurrent development of Spender's reputation under the editorship of Michael Roberts (the anthologies New Signatures and New Country) and Geoffrey Grigson (the periodical New Verse), whose disparate analyses of Spender's strengths identify his conflicting allegiances to socialist thought and to literary tradition. Spender's subsequent collected volumes include revised versions of the 1930s texts, but the historical versions, most notably Poems (1933) and the expanded edition (1934) possess a demonstrable thematic integrity that is inextricably related to the political and literary discourse of the time; their historical pertinence is disrupted by Spender's later revision and re-organisation of the poems. Although there have been numerous comparative studies of the work of 1930s authors, and two studies of Stephen Spender's oeuvre, this is the first comprehensive close analysis of the early poetry with which his reputation was established, and it is the first to prioritise the original published volume texts rather than the revised versions of Collected Poems 1928-1953 and Collected Poems 1928-1985. This study seeks to establish the literary-historical and aesthetic primacy of the 1930s versions (which are currently out of print) and argues that, despite Spender's own subsequent reservations about his 1930s politics, his poems exhibit a unique confluence of traditionalist literary aspiration with revolutionary ideology; these versions are valuable because of the inconsistencies and paradoxical logic which are characteristic of the period. Scholars of 1930s poetry and of Spender's verse career require access to these texts, which provide the only accurate representation of his creative development, and which reflect contemporary concerns that are obscured by later revisions. Of course, the poet's right to preserve his work in a certain form - or to discard it - is not disputed, rather this is an editorial acknowledgement of the claims of textual history.

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