SOURCE: Binding, Paul. “Shilling Lives.” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 224 (16 October 1992): 40-1.

In the following essay, Binding discusses Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame, and Stephen Spender, by Hugh David. Binding asserts that Keepers of the Flame is an extremely interesting and informative read, but that it lacks a strong line of developed argument.

“Who live under the shadow of war, / What can I do that matters?” Stephen Spender asks in one of the most poignant and famous of his Poems (1933). It distils the emotions of a whole generation, knowingly trapped between large-scale conflicts while still entertaining hopes and heeding instincts. The poem also alludes to the previous generation, to poets dead in the Great War, and particularly perhaps Wilfred Owen, whose passionate inclusive pity and nervous insistent rhythms and assonances are real presences in Spender's earlier work.

No less memorable is the second poem of that book...