Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1989,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a poet, a member of what he has called a special band of 30s writers. He came to prominence with W. A. Jordan,

Christopher Isherwood and Louis McNeese. Now aged 80 and a night.

He seems to represent the history of English letters in the 20th century.

Although he failed his degree at Oxford, he has since had literary honors heaped upon him.

For seven years he was professor of English at London University, but poetry is his first love and whatever his titles and honours, memories of his radical past ensure that he is no easy member of the establishment. They write of you now

Sir Stephen as a survivor because the famous who are your friends,

Orden Isherwood, Elliot, Virginia Woolford, dead.

Is that how you feel, one of the last survivors of a generation?

Yes, I do, I think.

I feel that I'm like something dropped from outer space, coded with messages from outer space, from all my friends

who are dead and all the people I know who are dead.

So are you constantly asked to recall them and be count tales of them.

Constantly, and then if I do, I'm accused of dropping names.

But you're rather like a medium, really, aren't you being used to contact the dead?

Yes, I feel like a medium.

I actually I think a great deal of my friends.

One thinks of a funny story, oh, I must ring Auden and tell him that,

and then you suddenly realize ordin's dead

that's rather distressing.

...