Sir Stephen Spender; British Poet, Essayist

Sir Stephen Spender, poet, critic, essayist and one of the preeminent British writers of the 1930s, died Sunday at 86.

Spender collapsed at home Sunday afternoon and was pronounced dead at a London hospital. His wife, concert pianist Natasha Litvin, was with him when he died.

Spender was a contemporary and friend of the poets W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. The group dominated British verse for decades.

He gained a reputation during the 1930s as a left-wing thinker, wrote poetry for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War and briefly was a member of the Communist Party. Later, he described his disillusionment with the party in his celebrated 1949 book, “The God That Failed.” After World War II, he joined a liberal anti-Communist movement.

Spender’s poetry was deeply personal as well as politically and socially conscious. He believed writers had a duty to society, and he upheld that duty in his poetry, in his editing and later in his work for a magazine defending freedom of expression.

Critical opinion diverged widely. “One must compare him to Goethe and Gide, artists who combine sensuality with puritanism, loving with willing, innocence with guile,” said Cyril Connelly. But Evelyn Waugh wrote: “To watch him fumbling with our rich and delicate English language is like seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.”

“That was a horrible remark,” Spender said years later. “But then the truth is that I do write with great difficulty and have absolutely no conviction that I write well.”

Asked once to name a favorite of his poems, he read a few lines of “One More Botched Beginning”:

Such pasts

Are not diminished

distances, perspective

Vanishing points, but doors

Burst open suddenly by

gusts

That seek to blow the heart

out . . .

Spender was born into a distinguished family of political liberals. In 1927, he entered Oxford University, where fellow student Auden--already an admired poet--encouraged his work and drew him into his circle of young writers.

Spender published his first book of poems in 1934, two more by 1937, and wrote plays and essays. He went to Spain, supporting the republicans against Franco’s Fascists, and wrote a volume of “Poems for Spain” in 1939.

Spender helped Cyril Connelly found the prestigious literary magazine Horizon and was co-editor for two years. He was joint editor of the anti-communist Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1967.

He was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress and held visiting professorships at several American universities, including UC Berkeley. Spender was knighted in 1983 for his service to literature, and was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1969. In his 70s, he explored China with painter David Hockney, and they wrote and illustrated “China Diary” in 1982.

Last year, American writer David Leavitt’s novel, “While England Sleeps,” was withdrawn from sale worldwide in an out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit by Spender. He said Leavitt infringed his copyright and his moral right to his own work by taking a story from the poet’s 1951 autobiography, “World Within World,” about his relationship with a young man in the 1930s. He alleged Leavitt used it in “While England Sleeps,” fleshing out with explicit homosexual detail.

In “World Within World,” Spender’s real-life relationship with Jimmy Younger, who fought on the defeated republican side in the Spanish Civil War, is not explicitly portrayed as homosexual.

In addition to his wife, Spender is survived by a daughter and a son.