A Study Guide for Stephen Spender's "What I Expected"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Stephen Spender's "What I Expected," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535842617

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What I Expected

Stephen Spender

1933

Introduction

Sir Stephen Spender's poem What I Expected was published in 1933 and is included in one of his earliest poetry collections, simply titled Poems. Spender was one of a group of 1930s poets known as the Oxford Poets, the Pylon Poets, and the Auden Group. These were poets who defined themselves as politically radical and socially conscious and concerned with the state of humanity and humankind. Spender felt that poetry should reflect the concerns of the world and that it should reflect the ideology of the poet. What I Expected is a thirty-two-line, four-stanza, free-verse poem that explores the poet's disillusionment with the world in which he lives. As a member of the Pylon Poets, Spender's poetry would have been expected to acknowledge the turbulent political and social landscape of the 1920s and 1930s. This includes themes such as loss of innocence and disillusionment, both of which are found in What I Expected.

What I Expected has been included in many anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Spender also included the poem in his 1985 volume Collected Poems: 1928–1985, and it appears in a later Spender collection, New Collected Poems, published in 2004.

Author Biography

Spender was born February 28, 1909, in Kensington, London, England, one of four children in a privileged household. His father, Edward Harold Spender, was a journalist. Spender's mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, was a poet and painter. His mother was chronically ill and died when he was twelve years old. His father died only a few years later in 1926, while Spender was still a teenager, leaving him dependent on his maternal grandparents for support. Spender attended several grammar schools and with his grandmother's financial help enrolled at University College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he met W. H. Auden, who became both a friend and an important influence on Spender's poetry. In 1928, while still at Oxford, Spender published his first collection of poems, Nine Experiments; Being Poems Written at the Age of Eighteen, on his own hand press. Spender left Oxford without graduating just before his senior year. With the financial help of his maternal grandmother, he