J. A. Spender Quotes

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

Language helps form the limits of our reality.

Language is not neutral. It is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas. It is itself a shaper of ideas.

When women are supposed to be quiet, a talkative woman is a woman who talks at all.

This monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and consequently have ensured the invisibility or 'other' nature of females.

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Men who teach only men are called scholars. Women who teach only women are called political agitators.

When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes, I was your son, high on your horse, My mind a top whipped by the lashes Of your rhetoric, windy of course.

There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife - a tyrannical midwife.

Sexual harassment is becoming the modus operandi of the new world (on-line)... It is the means by which some males are conquering and claiming the new territory as their own.

I think continually of those who were truly great.

All that you can imagine you already know.

So i learned both to accept myself and to aim beyond myself

... for centuries there has been a long and honorable tradition of women who have resisted and protested against men and their power.

All the posters on the walls All the leaflets in the streets Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain, Their words blotted out with tears, Skins peeling from their bodies In the victorious hurricane.

There is a certain justice in criticism.

Openly questioning the way the world works and challenging the power of the powerful is not an activity customarily rewarded.

I think of those who were truly great. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

what has been termed 'correct' English is nothing other than the blatant legitimation of the white middle-class code.

For I had expected always Some brightness to hold in trust, Some final innocence To save from dust

My single pair of eyes Contain the universe they see; Their mirrored multiplicity Is packed into a hollow body Where I reflect the many, in my one.

There is a real split today between those who push the button and those who do the dying.

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

Fear God, yes, but don't be afraid of Him.

No one Shall hunger: Man shall spend equally. Our goal which we compel: Man shall be man.

Never allow gradually the traffic to smother with noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

We all denounce bores, but while we do so, let us remember that there is nobody who isn't a bore to somebody.

For centuries women have been saying many of the things we are saying today and which we have often thought of as new.

Paradoxically, the most constructive thing women can do is to write, for in the act of writing we deny our muteness and begin to eliminate some of the difficulties that have been put upon us.

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.

I know there is no danger that I will ever forget that people construct their own reality, that human beings are not led to the same version of events and of the world by the same physical evidence.

Death to the killers, bringing light to life.

Have you noticed that all the news, statistics, strategies about unemployment are provided by those who are employed? As soon as you are unemployed you cease to exist.

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

It is cheap generosity which promises the future in compensation for the present.

What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent.

Never being, but always at the edge of Being.

An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance . . .

Poetry cannot take sides except with life.

I think continually of those who were truly great...Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Deep in the winter plain, two armies Dig their machinery, to destroy each other. Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave On either side, except the dead, and wounded.

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.

Hostility to youth is the worst vice of the middle-aged.

Religion stands, the Church blocking the sun.

What the eye delights in, no longer dictates My greed to enjoy: boys, grass, the fenced-off deer. It leaves those figures that distantly play On the horizon's rim: they sign their peace, in games.

If you get to a certain age, all people want to know about you is people you knew. ...An American student once said to me, you know, isn't it extraordinary that I am alive and you're not dead.

The only true hope for civilization-the conviction of the individual that his inner life can affect outward events and that, whether or not he does so he is responsible for them.

Since we are what we are, what shall we be But what we are? We are, we have Six feet and seventy years, to see The light , and then resign it for the grave .