- Born
- 28 February 1909London, England
- Died
- 16 July 1995London, England · aged 86
Stephen Spender
A poet of the “Auden generation” who loved men and women and wrote frankly about it in his autobiography.
Stephen Spender grew up in London in a family of journalists and writers. At Oxford he became friends with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and with them belonged to the generation of young left-wing poets of the 1930s. Like Isherwood he spent time in Weimar Berlin, which he experienced as a place of sexual freedom.
In the 1930s he had a relationship with a young man, Tony Hyndman, with whom he went to Spain during the Civil War. In 1936 he married Inez Pearn; the marriage soon ended. In 1941 he married the pianist Natasha Litvin, with whom he had two children and remained married until his death, while continuing to have relationships with men.
In his autobiography “World Within World” (1951) he wrote openly about his love for men, which was unusual for the time. After the war he co-edited the magazine “Encounter”; he resigned in 1967 when it emerged that it had been secretly financed by the CIA.
He taught at universities in Britain and the United States, served as US Poet Laureate Consultant in 1965 and was knighted in 1983. He died in London in 1995, aged 86.