The young Stephen Spender began a poem with the words "I think continually of those who were truly great".
For example, they both, without consulting each other, wrote parodies of Stephen Spender's poem "I think continually of those who were truly great".
Wading through the knee-deep romanticism and the flood of poorly plumbed imitation Auden and Eliot in his early verse, one eventually comes across a poem that stands out as a rock and a marker above all the others, the poem which begins, "I think continually of those who were truly great": "I think continually of those who were truly great.
Poems, such as "What I expected was", about acknowledging personal limitation, "I think continually of those who were truly great", an early paean to celebrity, and "One more botched beginning", in remembrance of old friends, will surely find a niche in anthologies.Mr Leeming has written a concise and interesting account of Spender's life, but he seems ambivalent about his subject.
When the mothers tell stories of their family struggles, during stretches in which the chorus sings a Stephen Spender poem ("I think continually of those who were truly great"), and in other affecting passages, Mr. Stucky tucks in hard-edged harmonies just beneath the consoling, shimmering surface of the music.
To Duthuit on Sept. 10, 1951: "I think continually of his last paintings, miracles of frenzied impotence, streaming with beauties and splendors like a shipwreck of phosphorescences,... with great wide ways along which everything rushes away and comes back again, and the crushed calm of the true deep" ("et le calme écrasé des très grands fonds").
He felt himself to be locked into his ranking as a 30s phenomenon - famous for period pieces which everybody knew but nobody took very seriously: The Pylons, The Landscape Near An Aerodrome and I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great.
It's surely no accident that this past generation, roughly 1980 to 2010, has seen more distinguished artists of all stripes accept peerages, knighthoods and other establishment baubles, from (Sir) William Golding (1988) to (Sir) Stephen Spender (1983), whose celebrated line "I think continually of those who were truly great" now has a rather hollow ring to it.
The ceremony began with President Kennedy's daughter, Caroline Kennedy, introducing her brother, John F. Kennedy, Jr., who read from the Stephen Spender poem, I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great.
That thought continually moves on.
