World Within World - Softcover

Spender, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312113587 ISBN 13: 9780312113582

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1994

Synopsis

Stephen Spender's autobiography is acknowledged to be one of the most illuminating literary works that have emerged to chronicle the period between the two world wars. In writing it, Stephen Spender was concerned, as he states, with a few recurrent themes: "love, poetry, politics, the life of literature, childhood, travel, and the development of certain attitudes towards moral problems." In the course of the book there are memorable portraits of Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood, among many others.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"In this book I am mainly concerned with a few themes: love; poetry; politics; the life of literature....I believe obstinately that, if I am able to write with truth about what has happened to me, this can help others....In this belief I have risked being indiscreet, and I have written occasionally of experiences which seem strange to me myself, and which I have not seen discussed else-where." So begins Stephen Spender's autobiography, widely acclaimed as the twentieth century's greatest memoir.

Spender was one of his generation's most celebrated poets, a writer living at the intersection of literature and politics in Europe between the two world wars. His portraits of his friends?Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden,
W. B. Yeats, and Christopher Isherwood?render a romantic world of literary genius. Spender uses a poet's language to create an honest and tender exploration of amity and the many possibilities of love. First published in 1951, World Within World simultaneously shocked and bedazzled the literary establishment for its frank discussion of Eros in the modern world.

Out of print for several years, this Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the critic John Bayley and an Afterword Spender wrote in 1994 describing his reaction to the charges that David Leavitt plagiarized this autobiography in a novel.

From the Back Cover:

"World Within World is without any question the best autobiography in English written in the twentieth century."
--John Bayley, from his new Introduction

"Superb...[Spender's] best writing charges us with his own best qualities: the moral earnestness, the lucid piety, the lyrical intelligence."
--The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0312113587
• ISBN 13: 9780312113582
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 349