BIOGRAPHY

Stephen Spender was a member of the generation of British poets who came
to prominence in the 1930s, a groupsometimes referred to as the Oxford
Poetsthat included W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, and
Louis MacNeice. In World within World: The Autobiography of Stephen
Spender the author speculated that the names of the members of the group
became irreversibly linked in the minds of critics for no other reason other
than having their poems included in the same important poetic anthologies of
the early thirties. However, in The Angry Young Men of the Thirties Elton
Edward Smith found that the poets had much more in common and stated
that they shared a "similarity of theme, image, and diction." According to
Smith, the poets also all rejected the writing of the immediately preceding
generation. Gerald Nicosia reached the same conclusion in his Chicago
Tribune Book World essay on Spender's...