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Loading... World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender (1951)by Stephen Spender
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A lyrical and fascinating memoir, this book was written when the author was still in his forties. Included here is an introduction for this new 1994 edition. I enjoyed the references to both Auden and Isherwood, two of my favorite authors, while Spender's prose style complements his own poetry. ( ) I enjoyed this book very much as I found him very interesting, sensitive and extremely honest considering the time in which it was written. The 50's were stifling to anyone that wasn't white bread and butter. His life crossed paths with many fascinating people such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf. The profound long term affect of his difficult childhood is very well done.
At one stage of his life Mr Spender took to painting and, he naively tells us, then learned the great lesson that 'it is possible entirely to lack talent in an art where one believes oneself to have creative feeling.' It is odd that this never occurred to him while he was writing, for to see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.
One of a series of titles first published by Faber between 1930 and 1990, and in a style and format planned with a view to the appearance of the volumes on the bookshelf. Spender's literary autobiography incorporates portraits of contemporaries such as Woolf, Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Isherwood. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)821.912Literature English & Old English literatures English poetry 1900- 1900-1999 1900-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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