Allegiance in the Poetry of Stephen Spender, 1928-1935 Michael Brett Ph.D. in English Literature University College London 2002 ProQuest Number: U643127 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U643127 Published by ProQuest LLC(2015). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract The study aims to provide a detailed analysis of Stephen Spender’s verse up to 1935, with particular attention to his use of the language of contemporary political discourse. It examines the interrelation of Spender’s poetry with the literary milieu of late modernism within which it first appeared, analysing the reception of his published volumes and the dissemination of early critical ideas about his writing. The texts which provide the basis for the study are Nine Experiments (1928), Twenty Poems (1930), Poems (1933/1934) and Vienna (1934). Also examined is the concurrent development of Spender’s reputation under the editorship of Michael Roberts (the anthologies New Signatures and New Country) and Geoffrey Grigson (the periodical New Verse), whose disparate analyses of Spender’s strengths identify his conflicting allegiances to socialist thought and to literary tradition. Spender’s subsequent collected volumes include revised versions of the 1930s texts, but the historical versions, most notably Poems (1933) and the expanded edition (1934) possess a demonstrable thematic integrity that is inextricably related to the political and literary discourse of the time; their historical pertinence is disrupted by Spender’s later revision and re-organisation of the poems. Although there have been numerous comparative studies of the work of 1930s authors, and two studies of Stephen Spender’s oeuvre, this is the first comprehensive close analysis of the early poetry with which his reputation was established, and it is the first to prioritise the original published volume texts rather than the revised versions of Collected Poems 1928-1953 and Collected Poems 1928-1985. This study seeks to establish the literary-historical and aesthetic primacy of the 1930s versions (which are currently out of print) and argues that, despite Spender’s own subsequent reservations about his 1930s politics, his poems exhibit a unique confluence of traditionalist literary aspiration with revolutionary ideology; these versions are valuable because of the inconsistencies and paradoxical logic which are characteristic of the period. Scholars of 1930s poetry and of Spender’s verse career require access to these texts, which provide the only accurate representation of his creative development, and which reflect contemporary concerns that are obscured by later revisions. Of course, the poet’s right to preserve his work in a certain form - or to discard it - is not disputed, rather this is an editorial acknowledgement of the claims of textual history. Contents Abstract 2 Contents 3 Acknowledgements 4 1. Critical Approach to the 1930s 5 2. Nine Experiments (1928) and Twenty Poems (1930) 37 3. Poems (1933) 74 4. Poems (1934): Van der Lubbe and the Brown Book 131 5. The “Spender Myth”: New Signatures, New Country 162 diVidNew Verse (1932-1935) 6. Vienna (1934) 214 7. Spender’s Revisions and the “Claims of History” 262 Bibliography 280 Acknowledgements Lady Natasha Spender and the Stephen Spender Trust for invaluable support, hospitality and insightful suggestions, and Professor John Sutherland, for generous insight into the life behind the 1930s work. The British Academy Humanities Research Board and University College London Graduate School for financial support while researching this thesis. For unique information and advice: Professor Edward Mendelson, Ann Totterdell, and the late Gabriel Carritt. For encouragement and suggestions: Professor Rosemary Ashton, Professor René Weis, Dr Neil Rennie, Katherine Bucknell, Peter Parker. The staff of the following research libraries: The British Library; the University of London Library at Senate House; University College London Library; the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin; the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. For solidarity and advice: Grace Chapman, David Cross, Lucy Daniel, Daniel Diclerico, Brian Dunn, Leila Easa, Henry Hitchings, Rowland Hughes, Susie Jordan, James Kidd, Jennifer Levy-Halford, Ellen Sarah Maxwell, Scott Palmer, Dinah Roe, Ennn Skeffington, Pedro Garcia Sanchez, Andrew Wiersma, Sarah Wood. For hospitality and transport overseas: Jennifer Aspen, Mercedes Blanco, Laurel Carlin, Blackie Cohen, Anne Dunn, Dominic de Grunne, Jean-Marie del Moral, Sophie Henley- Price, Gill and Sean MacKay, Jeremy and Ryan Ogulnick. For longstanding hospitality, encouragement and distraction: Cate Anderson, Victoria Benjamin, Fiona Brice, Ian Bums, Glyn Cannon, Dr Luca Deidda, Sandra De Sousa, Nicky Drake, Adam English, James Fortune and family, Antonia Maria Gallego, Barney George, Debbie Hatfield, Debbie Lee, Richard Matthews and family, Pat McCarthy, Victoria Moseley and family, James Murphy, Sophia Parsons, Ed Roe, Nicholas and Bella Roy le, Lauren Sandler, Michael J Sheehy, Sarah Spitz, José Stalin, Dr Tassos Stevens, Anna Thomson, Benjamin Till, Dr Marco Vannini, Rohini Varughese. To my parents and family for unconditional support and patience. December 2001 1. Critical Approach to the 1930s 1. Critical Approach to the 1930s In recent years, a minor literary critical struggle has been taking place. The region under dispute is best termed “British Literature of the 1930s” - although, unsurprisingly, a major contention is the definition, and the usefulness, of this restricting term. This struggle over a terrain of texts of various forms (which was produced by a host of writers equally in conflict with their contemporaries) is, as Karl Marx would gladly observe, a political struggle. It is a very British literary critical struggle concerning a notion still dominant in the operation of criticism in this country - the unspoken politics of the literary canon: the canon of the nation and all its histoiicised writers “worthy” of study, and also the biographical oeuvres of individual writers. There are many disagreements, perhaps impossible to resolve. Most fundamental^ perhaps, is the question of whether or not the 1930s should be isolated, even for the purposes of discussion. It is the decade which saw the continuation of a global, post-war economic depression which had begun in the 1920s; the gradual rise of the Nazi Party in Germany which culminated in their taking power in 1933 and forcing the world into war in 1939; the flirtation of the intellectuals with communism while calling for the British government to take a more internationalist perspective on the continental threat. It is a decade which is manifestly transitional and in between - in between wars, in between crises, in between more distinct cultural eras. The socio- historical processes which saw the ideological flurry of British literature in the 1930s had started long before the decade itself, reached their most extreme culmination after it had ended, and were largely instigated and driven by international forces which lay outside the country and its domestic culture. This critical debate then, which is attempting to limit itself to literature of this particular duration of time and geographical location, unsurprisingly finds itself confronted with a host of troubling - and perhaps, from an imagined, distant perspective of the 1930s themselves - rather familiar issues. The most significant issue appears to be this: How is literature which is openly propagandist, or at least explicitly sympathetic to a political cause, to be judged as literatureper se by the reader of the early twenty-first century? In terms of literary genre, this question is far more 5 1. Critical Approach to the 1930s troublesome in the appreciation and analysis of lyrical verse than in the reading of 1930s fiction; in the latter, narratives which allude to current affairs seem to attain allegorical status in later periods by virtue of their superficial historicity. In other words, the period details of prose fiction tend to become stylistic traits as opposed to thematic content. There is a substantial difference between a Graham Greene novel, such as It's a Battlefield (1934), which absorbs the daily realities of Communist Party meetings and fascist parades, deploying them within the backdrop of a Conradian London, and Stephen Spender’s poem “Van der Lubbe”, which, after seventy years, can only yield its meaning - as a haunting sketch of the duped arsonist of the Reichstag - with a small degree of historical glossing. Part of the meaning of this poem is not now merely its contemporary pertinence, but its historical portentousness; the Reichstag Fire and the ensuing anti-communist show-trial were the first international signals of Hitler’s imminent consolidation of power. The terrorist attack was an early and hotly-debated “media event” across Europe, the perpetrator