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Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965. Early life Spender was born in Kensington, London, to journalist Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet, of German Jewish heritage. He went first to Hall School in Hampstead and then at 13 to Gresham's School, Holt and later Charlecote School in Worthing, but he was unhappy there. On the death of his mother, he was transferred to University College School (Hampstead), which he later described as "that gentlest of schools". Spender left for Nantes and Lausanne and then went up to University College, Oxford (much later, in 1973, he was made an honorary fellow). Spender said at various times throughout his life that he never passed any exam. Perhaps his closest friend and the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kensington
Kensington is an area of London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, around west of Central London. The district's commercial heart is Kensington High Street, running on an east–west axis. The north-east is taken up by Kensington Gardens, containing the Albert Memorial, the Serpentine Gallery and John Hanning Speke, Speke's monument. South Kensington and Gloucester Road, London, Gloucester Road are home to Imperial College London, the Royal College of Music, the Royal Albert Hall, Natural History Museum, London, Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Science Museum, London, Science Museum. The area is also home to many embassies and consulates. Name The Manorialism, manor of ''Chenesitone'' is listed in the Domesday Book of 1086, which in the Old English language, Anglo-Saxon language means "Chenesi's List of generic forms in place names in Ireland and the United Kingdom, ton" (homestead/settlement). One early spelling is ''Kesyngton'', as wri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University College School
University College School, also known as UCS, is a private day school in Frognal, Hampstead, London, England. The school was founded in 1830 by University College London and inherited many of that institution's progressive and secular views. The UCS Hampstead Foundation is composed of three main entities: the Pre-Prep (previously known as The Phoenix School) for ages 3 to 7 on the Finchley Road site, acquired by UCS in 2003; the Junior Branch, for boys aged 7 to 11 on the Holly Hill site in Hampstead; and the Senior School, for boys aged 11 to 16 and co-educational for ages 16 to 18 on the Frognal site, which is the largest school site. The main campus and the Great Hall are noted examples of Edwardian architecture. Inside the hall is a Walker pipe organ, used for school concerts, professional recordings and other festivities. The school also owns playing fields situated in Ranulf Road in West Hampstead, used for training, physical education and sporting fixtures. UCS is a me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions. Best known for his poem " Howl", Ginsberg denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. San Francisco police and US Customs seized copies of "Howl" in 1956, and a subsequent obscenity trial in 1957 attracted widespread publicity due to the poem's language and descriptions of heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made male homosexual acts a crime in every state. The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (, 13 June 186528 January 1939), popularly known as W. B. Yeats, was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th century in literature, 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with John Millington Synge and Augusta, Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, and later served two terms as a Seanad Éireann (Irish Free State), Senator of the Irish Free State. A Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent, Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland. His father practised law and was a successful portrait painter. He was educated in Dublin and London and spent his childhood holidays in County Sligo. He studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish mythology, Irish legends and the occult. While in London he became part of the Irish literary revi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Jones (poet)
David Michael Jones CH ( David Walter Jones; 1 November 1895 – 28 October 1974) was a British painter and modernist poet. As a painter he worked mainly in watercolour on portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and inscription painter. In 1965, Kenneth Clark took him to be the best living British painter, while both T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden put his poetry among the best written in their century. Jones's work gains form from his Christian faith and Welsh heritage. Biography Early life Jones was born at Arabin Road, Brockley, Kent, now a suburb of South East London, and later lived in nearby Howson Road. His father, James Jones, was born in Flintshire in north Wales, to a Welsh-speaking family, but he was discouraged from speaking Welsh by his father, who believed that habitual use of the language might hold his child back in a career. James Jones moved to London to work as a printer's overseer for the ''Christian Hera ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cecil Day-Lewis
Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis; 27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972), often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, most of which feature the fictional detective Nigel Strangeways. During World War II, Day-Lewis worked as a publications editor in the UK government's Ministry of Information (United Kingdom), Ministry of Information and also served in the Musbury branch of the Home Guard (United Kingdom), Home Guard. He was the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis. Life and work Day-Lewis was born in 1904 in Ballintubbert, Athy/Stradbally border, Queen's County (now known as County Laois), Ireland. He was the son of Frank Day-Lewis, a Church of Ireland rector of that parish, and Kathleen Blake (née Squires; died 1906). Some of his family were from England and the family had ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Upward
Edward Falaise Upward, FRSL (9 September 1903 – 13 February 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer who, prior to his death, was believed to be the UK's oldest living author. Initially gaining recognition amongst the Auden Group as a highly imaginative surrealist writer, in the 1930s he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, after which his writing shifted towards Marxist realism. His literary career spanned over eighty years. Early life and education Upward was born on 9 September 1903 in Romford, Essex, where his father had a doctor's surgery. His parents were Harold Arthur Upward (1874–1958), who came from a middle-class family on the Isle of Wight, and Louisa "Isa" Upward (''née'' Jones; 1869–1951), who had trained as a nurse and tried acting. His mother, who had grown up in Wanstead but was of Welsh descent, came from a lower-middle-class background but was very class conscious, a trait Upward strongly disliked. His siblings were John Mervyn Upwa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis MacNeice
Frederick Louis MacNeice (12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963) was an Irish poet, playwright and producer for the BBC. Known for its exploration of introspection, empiricism, and belonging, his poetic work is now ranked among the twentieth century's greatest. Despite being renowned as a member of the Auden Group, he was also an independently successful (albeit occasionally overlooked) poet with an influential body of work, which is replete with themes ranging from faith to mortality. His body of work was appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots. MacNeice was awarded the CBE in the 1958 New Year Honours list. Life Ireland, 1907–1917 Louis MacNeice (known as Freddie until his teens, when he adopted his middle name ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Auden Group
The Auden Group, also called Auden Generation and sometimes simply the Thirties poets, was a group of British and Irish writers active in the 1930s that included W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood and sometimes Edward Upward and Rex Warner. Overview Although many newspaper articles and a few books appeared about the "Auden Group", the existence of the group was essentially a journalistic myth, a convenient label for poets and novelists who were approximately the same age, who had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge, who had known each other at different times and had more or less left-wing views ranging from MacNeice's political scepticism to Upward's committed communism. The "group" was never together in the same room: the four poets (Auden, Day-Lewis, MacNeice and Spender) were in the same room only once in the 1930s, for a BBC broadcast in 1938 of modern poets (also including Dylan Thomas and others who were not associa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hamburg
Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-largest in the European Union with a population of over 1.9 million. The Hamburg Metropolitan Region has a population of over 5.1 million and is the List of EU metropolitan areas by GDP, eighth-largest metropolitan region by GDP in the European Union. At the southern tip of the Jutland Peninsula, Hamburg stands on the branching River Elbe at the head of a estuary to the North Sea, on the mouth of the Alster and Bille (Elbe), Bille. Hamburg is one of Germany's three city-states alongside Berlin and Bremen (state), Bremen, and is surrounded by Schleswig-Holstein to the north and Lower Saxony to the south. The Port of Hamburg is Germany's largest and Europe's List of busiest ports in Europe, third-largest, after Port of Rotterdam, Rotterda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poems (Auden)
''Poems'' is the title of three separate collections of the early poetry of W. H. Auden. Auden refused to title his early work because he wanted the reader to confront the poetry itself. Consequently, his first book was called simply ''Poems'' when it was printed by his friend and fellow poet Stephen Spender in 1928; he used the same title for the very different book published by Faber and Faber in 1930 (2nd ed. 1933), and by Random House in 1934, which also included '' The Orators'' and '' The Dance of Death''. The privately-printed 1928 edition of ''Poems'' was of "about 45 copies", as stated on its limitation page; probably only around 30 copies were actually printed. It is one of the great rarities of twentieth century literature. The 1930 commercially published edition of ''Poems'' appeared from Faber and Faber in 1930, having been accepted by T. S. Eliot; it was printed in an edition of 1,000 copies. Only a small number of the poems in the 1928 version survived into the 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include '' Goodbye to Berlin'' (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical ''Cabaret'' (1966); ''A Single Man'' (1964), adapted into a film directed by Tom Ford in 2009; and '' Christopher and His Kind'' (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement". Biography Family Isherwood was the elder son of Francis Edward Bradshaw Isherwood (1869–1915), known as Frank, a professional soldier in the York and Lancaster Regiment, and Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood, née Machell Smith (1868–1960), the only daughter of a successful wine merchant. He was the grandson of John Henry Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall and Wyberslegh Hall, Cheshire, and he included among his ancestors the Puritan judge John Bradshaw, who signed the death warrant of King C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
