Spender Quotes

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”

“The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards an ideal aim. The idea that a goal can be attained perpetually frustrates human beings, who are disappointed at never getting there, never being able to stop.”

“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”

“When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes, I was your son, high on your horse, My mind a top whipped by the lashes Of your rhetoric, windy of course.”

“It is cheap generosity which promises the future in compensation for the present.”

“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”

“Born of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour.”

“When you read and understand a poem comprehending its rich and formal meanings then you master chaos a little.”

“You are ultimately responsible for your life and no one else.”