Born in London in 1909, Stephen Spender was the son of Harold Spender, liberal journalist and would-be politician, from whom, it could be argued, the young Spender inherited his desire for public attention.

By the time Spender reached University College, Oxford, he had already decided to make his name as a poet. He proclaimed himself to be a 'pacifist and a socialist, a genius', and swiftly aligned himself to fellow left-leaning student contemporaries Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice. His early socially aware verse, in collections such as Poems (1933) and The Still Centre (1939), serve to illustrate the turbulent political climate of the period. Eschewing the more traditional pastoral themes of English poetry, Spender - in true Soviet Realist fashion - opted instead to focus on industrial imagery. The Pylons, among his best-known poems, stems from this time.

Unlike, Auden and Isherwood, Spender remained in Europe when the Second World War broke out. He abandoned doctrinaire socialism and came to believe that writers possess a unique social and public duty to fight oppression - in 1972 he was instrumental in founding Index on Censorship. During the 1940s his poetry became more obviously personal and lyrical. Ruins and Visions (1942) and Poems of Dedication (1947), with its Elegy for Margaret, written in remembrance of his dead sister-in-law, provide fine examples of his adroit emotional directness.

Spender published relatively little poetry in later life but remained active on the literary scene, penning critical studies, a novel, two volumes of memoirs and making numerous translations of Rilke, Schiller, Toller and Garcia Lorca. His Journals (1939-1983), published in 1985, were widely acclaimed. Since his death in 1995, an authorised biography by John Sutherland and a new revised edition of his Collected Poems, has sparked fresh interest Spender's poetic output.