SOURCE: An obituary in The New York Times, July 18, 1995, p. B11.

[Pace is an American journalist. In the obituary below, he surveys Spender's life and career.]

Sir Stephen Spender, the British poet, critic and novelist, died Sunday at St. Mary's Hospital in London. He was 86.

He had been taken to the hospital after collapsing at his home in north London, a spokesman for the hospital said.

In the 1930's, Stephen Spender was one of a small number of young poets who gave a new direction to English letters by insisting that poetry be linked to political and social concerns and other aspects of the larger world.

In yesterday's issue of The Guardian, the scholar and critic Sir Frank Kermode wrote that Mr. Spender's writings on politics, "and on the relation of artists to politics, remain the most considered and the most serious of any by the young writers...