STEPHEN SPENDER
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make
one
thing of it, which was my great interest in the struggle go–
ing on in Nazi Germany, when I was there and after I left.
SR:
On the whole, does the world seem a better one, say, for a
young writer than it was when you went to Oxford?
SS:
Yes, in the sense that even if young poets in England today don't
have a spectacular success, they can still support themselves fairly
well because the Arts Council pays for readings they give. We didn't
have any opportunity of that kind. A few writers when I was
young- and I happen to be one of them - really had very little dif–
ficulty because we were recognized almost immediately. But the
ones who weren't recognized did have a very difficult time.
SR:
Back in the sixties, writing about the state of British poetry at
that time, you singled out Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Thorn
Gunn. Whom would you add to that list now?
SS:
There are quite a lot of poets who write quite interesting poems,
but I don't think that there has been a major figure since Larkin and
Gunn and Hughes.
PM:
Auden, in his first
Collected Poems,
talks about the "slim volume
for which one is honestly grateful." Looking back on your years of
writing and friendships, what seems to count the most?
SS:
A selection of poems, perhaps , the autobiography, and that's
about it, I think.
PM:
You were critical of Virginia Woolf, looking at Edith Cavell's
statue, and saying, "Patriotism isn't enough." You wanted to say to
her, "Sensibility isn't enough." Doesn't she turn out to be right in the
end? Aren't personal relationships what matter most?
SS:
No, I don't think she is right. I adored Virginia Woolf, and I
very much like her work. But I don't think a work ofjust sensibility is
enough.
SR:
You've written of the development in this century of the poet–
critic and the critic-poet. You yourself have done a number of
critical, or scholarly, books in the past few years regarding the state
of the artist in society. Do you think, on the whole, that criticism has
improved in our time?
SS:
A lot of criticism that's written now I simply don't understand at
all. I don't understand what's meant by "structuralism," for instance,
and I don't think I want to. Unless I felt that understanding, say,
structuralism would help me to write, I'd rather not know about it.
So I'll give it the miss; I find that I give a lot of things the miss, and
ten years later everyone's stopped being interested in them anyway.
But criticism did make great contributions to our understand-
