in the "truly great", as the phrase from his famous poem has it--has more than a trace of his German, and specifically German-Jewish, background. The German Jews had embraced Kultur virtually as a passport to legal emancipation and civil rights, obtained by 1871, and to ultimate acceptance in German society, in which they were to be brutally disenchanted. Many of Spender's best-known poems were written in Germany; it could be argued that his poetry generally declined after 1933, when it was no longer safe for him to live there, and he turned increasingly to prose.
from The Times Literary Supplement: Stephen Spender's Jewish roots
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