There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife - a tyrannical midwife.

Spender's second wife Natasha whom he married in 1941 was also Jewish. Spender was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) at the 1962 Queen's Birthday Honours and knighted in the 1983 Queen's Birthday Honours.

Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work. He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965.