Stephen Spender is one of a group of poets--the Auden or Oxford Generation--which also includes Louis MacNeice and C. Day Lewis. They began having their poetry published in the early 1930s, a decade whose ever-worsening crises--depression and massive unemployment, the rise of Fascism, and the approach of World War II--increasingly turned their poetry toward political themes. A lyricist of considerable gifts, though overshadowed by the major talent of his mentor, W. H. Auden, Spender forced his poems of the 1930s into a political mold. At the end of that decade, he returned to a more personal poetic mode. He is remembered chiefly for poems he wrote in his twenties. From the 1950s through the 1970s Spender almost abandoned poetry for literary criticism and political journalism. As a critic, Spender, despite a broad comparative knowledge of the arts and plentiful ideas, is basically an unanalytical, unsystematic thinker. His prose...