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obtained a copy of his old draft manuscript—admired in the early thirties by his London publisher, but remaining unpublished because of ...

"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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

THE TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER***SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION******SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE******SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE***A Book of the YearThe Times * Sunday Times * Telegraph * New Statesman * Financial Times * Irish Independent * Daily Mail...

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...

The definitive collection of work from one of Australia's preeminent twentieth century poets, Kenneth Slessor, drawing from his acclaimed books, Earth Visitors (1926), Cuckooz Contrey (1932) and Five Bells (1939).this selection was first published as One Hundred Poems in 1944 (with the addition of three further poems in 1957), and includes an introduction by Dennis Haskell and an Author's Note.From his historical series, 'Five Visions of C...