The story behind this novel by one of twentieth-century Britain’s great poets and men of letters is nearly as remarkable as the book itself. Not long ago, a friend just returned from America told the author that he had read in the Spender manuscript collection of the University of Texas a novel called The Temple and dated 1929. Stephen Spender immediately obtained a copy of his old draft manuscript—admired in the early thirties by his London publisher, but remaining unpublished because of ...

Stephen Spender, the son of a journalist, was born in London in 1909. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he met, among others, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, with whom he was to develop a poetics of engagement, writing powerfully of the confusion and alarm of 1930s Europe. He visited Spain during the Civil War, in 1937, where he assisted the Republican cause with propaganda activity. His post-war memoir World within World was recognised as...

Stephen Spender, along with his friends W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and C. Day Lewis, rose to prominence in the 1930s, writing powerfully of the fear and paranoia of a continent heading towards war. By the time of his death in 1995 he had established a distinguished reputation as a poet, critic, editor and translator. This New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Brett, gathers seven decades of verse from Poems (1933) to Dolphins (1994) and ...

Private faces in public placesAre wiser and nicerThan public faces in private places.W.H. Auden, dedication to Stephen Spender, 1932Stephen Spender wrote almost a million words of journal entries between his September Journal in 1939 and his death in 1995. In choosing from these voluminous journals for the new edition, the editors have tried to provide a picture of the various lives Spender brought together in autobiographic...

Poems Written Abroad is the first publication of the earliest collection of poetry by the famous poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, and radical, Sir Stephen Spender (1909-1995). Spender wrote and compiled this manuscript in 1927, when he was living in Nantes and Lausanne. In tone and diction, Spender's poems range from creatively traditional to unexpectedly innovative. They reflect his reading in Shakespeare and French poetry, as well as his absorption in music and moder...

Proclaimed "one of the great American writers of short fiction" by the New York Times Book Review, William Goyen (1915-1983) had a quintessentially American literary career, in which national recognition came only after years of struggle to find his authentic voice, his audience, and an artistic milieu in which to create. These letters, which span the years 1937 to 1983, offer a compelling testament to what it means to be a writer in America.A prolific correspondent, Goyen wrote regularly to ...

Hear rare recordings from some of the world's most-respected poets reading their own works: Ezra Pound, Old Men With Beautiful Manners; William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle Of Innisfree; Robert Graves, A Last Poem; Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Harp-Weaver; Richard Eberhart, The Groundhog; Philip Levine, Blasting From Heaven; Marianne Moore, The Mind Is An Enchanting Thing; Stephen Spender, What I Expected; Vachel Lindsay, An Interpolation By Mr. Lindsay. Recording obtained and published by ...

"Berlin is a city forever in the process of becoming, never being, and so it lives more powerfully in the imagination." Rory Maclean, 'Berlin - Imagine a City'.Located at the epicentre of some of modern Europe's most significant and turbulent events, Berlin has long held a magnetic attraction for writers.From 19th century authors recording the city's dramatic transition from Prussian Hauptstadt to German capital after 1871 and the modernist intellectuals of the Weimar period, to the resist...

**How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more?This internationally acclaimed revelatory history—"filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries" (The *New York Times)—*of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust.Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs a...

**INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER: This “absolute gem of a book” offers a month-by-month account of the year before World War I—one of the most exciting times in the 20th century (The Observer).“A sexy, comic and occasionally heartbreaking soap opera” for history buffs interested in 20th-century art, music, and literature (Washington Post).**It was the year Henry Ford first put a conveyer belt in his car factory, and the year Louis Armstrong first picked up a tru...

A Wild Peculiar Joy is Irving Layton’s poetic testament. Hailed as the great lyric poet, Irving Layton has come to be known as one of Canada’s most powerful, groundbreaking voices, an important and influential writer whose distinguished career spanned almost forty-five years. By turns passionate and grave, joyous and apocalyptic, his beautifully crafted poems are illuminated by a strong social and political conscience, and an intensely humanistic view of the world. This i...

This collection of Seamus Heaney's work, especially in the vivid and surprising twelve-line poems entitled "Squarings", shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and "to credit marvels". The title poem, "Seeing Things", is typical of the whole book. It begins with memories of an actual event, then moves towards the visionary while never relinquishing its feel for the textures and sensations of the world. Translations of Virgil and Homer provide a prelude and a coda where motifs implicit i...