In his poem "Judas Iscariot," Stephen Spender depicts Judas's betrayal of Christ as an act of defiant individualism, and he further proposes that perhaps Christ betrayed Judas. These unusual arguments, however, are not without precedent in twentieth-century literature, and there exists considerable evidence to suggest that Spender adapted to his own poetic purposes ideas that had already been given wide currency by Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence. (p. 126)

"Judas Iscariot" expresses the same militant individualism, the same inadequacy in Christ that characterizes Wilde's, Yeats's, and Lawrence's use of this motif. Spender's poem affords an excellent study in literary inter-relationships, and it further reveals the unorthodox use of Christian myth in twentieth-century literature. (p. 130)

Leslie M. Thompson, "Spender's 'Judas Iscariot'," in English Language Notes (© copyright 1970, Regents of the University of Colorado), December, 1970, pp. 126-30.