Collected Poems, 1928-1985

The Collected Poems of Stephen Spender gathers together the renowned poet's major work for the first time in over thirty years. It contains recent uncollected poems, including remembrances of Auden, Stravinsky, and Louis MacNiece, as well as previously uncollected earlier poems based on Rilke, Lorca, and Altoguirre, and choruses from Sir Stephen's version of Sophocles' Oedipus Trilogy.
Sir Stephen has also made considerable changes in the texts of his earlier work, eliminating some poems and significantly revising many others. In the introduction he writes: "In reworking poems I have always done so with the sense that in writing a poem I have certain intentions which I very rarely forget. If I take up a notebook and find in it a sketch for a poem which I made many years ago I can remember exactly what I was setting out to do, and I sometimes find that I can continue it as though I had written the sketch yesterday." A poet of engagement, both political and emotional, Stephen Spender has witnessed and vividly described the traumas and trials of his age. This definitive collection stands as his essential testimony.