Stephen Spender, the English Poet

The visiting Englishman who addressed the studio was, as the author only much later understood, the noted English poet Stephen Spender. At the time of his visit he was a complete mystery to the studio audience: a tall, very English, very serious man whose accent defeated every attempt to understand him, and who left everyone dispersing in 'utter bafflement'. He functions in the essay less as a developed personality than as the emblem of that comic, baffling encounter between the studio's small world and the larger world of English letters. The mystery cleared only when the narrator, years later, found Spender among the six contributors to 'The God That Failed' — six writers describing their journeys into Communism and …