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Stephen Spender
A Literary Life
by John Sutherland
Sutherland, an English professor, bases much of this autobiography of the 20th century poet and writer (whose childhood friends included W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood) on his unprecedented access to Spender's own private papers.
Oxford University Press, 627 pages
12/31/2004
$40.00
ISBN: 0195178165
Nonfiction
Biographies & Memoirs
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Bryce Christensen
The '30s, appropriately, loom large in this revealing new biography of Spender, probing the way one of England's most brilliant but protean modern poets helped to define 10 tempestuous years. [1 Jan 2005, p.802]
Library Journal Ben Bruton
[The] most thorough biography of Spender's life to date. [1 Jan 2005, p.130]
Kirkus Reviews
An excellent account of the British poet's life, particularly strong on his personality, literary friendships, and political activism.
Publishers Weekly
Shrewd, laconic and beautifully paced, Sutherland's portrait of a poet and his luminary circle will absorb all readers of 20th-century literary history.
Wall Street Journal Joseph Bottum
That is enough to carry an enjoyable biography. But it is not enough for greatness -- not enough to set Spender among those of whom he wrote admiringly: "Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields / See how these names are fêted by the waving grass / And by the streamers of white cloud / And whispers of wind in the listening sky."
Washington Post Michael Dirda
If Sutherland hopes for his biography to send readers back to his subject's poetry, he failed with me... Still, a fine literary biography doesn't need to be about the truly great, only about the truly interesting.
London Review Of Books Stefan Collini
Whatever one's analysis of the whole tangled ["Encounter"] business, Sutherland's exposition of its final act is masterly and absorbing.
Boston Globe Barbara Fisher
This long, respectful, and revelatory biography just manages to cover Spender's remarkably rich life. From the pretty boys of Berlin to the Guy Burgess spy scandal, Spender not only saw it all but actually lived it all.
Slate Stephen Metcalf
John Sutherland, over 600 pages of an otherwise reverent biography, makes only the meekest case for Spender the literary artist.
The Economist
The second half is a more prosaic presentation, sometimes day-by-day, often week-by-week, of the events until his death in 1995, almost at times an expansion of Spender's enormously full social diary.
Los Angeles Times Peter Stansky
Often, however, in the reading of these books, one asks, was it necessary to share quite so much with the reader? [19 Dec 2004, p.R6]
The New Yorker
Sutherland’s authorized biography takes Spender’s literary achievement as a given, but his close readings of the poems don’t quite persuade one that Spender was a writer of the first rank.
Atlantic Monthly Christopher Hitchens
An author has furthermore become far too close to his subject if he can write—this time unironically, and of a domestic row in the ski resort of Gstaad—that "the upheaval dwarfed the Suez crisis."
The New York Times Book Review Daniel Swift
The formulaic structure of this biography -- beginning with his grandparents, and following the rigid pattern of one chapter per decade of Spender's life -- suggests an unwillingness, on the part of Sutherland, to consider his subject creatively.
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